


Saving Grace

by fairmanor



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: 19th Century New York, Alternate Universe - Historical, Ballet AU, Ballet Dancer Patrick Brewer, Christmas, Dancer!Patrick, Fluff, M/M, New York winter, Swan Lake - Freeform, Theatre Owner David, Very Brief smut (like blink and you’ll miss it)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:49:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27581615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: New York, 1895, and David Rose is at his wit’s end. Struggling as the reluctant director of the Opera Rouge, the finest of the Rose Collaboration theatres, David is running out of options to keep his career alive and his doors open. But when a chance encounter with an aspiring ballet dancer flips his world upside down, David learns that there’s so much more in store for him than he could ever have imagined.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 34
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to justwaiting23 and seadeepy as a thank you for putting up with my ballet and technical related ramblings, but also to everyone else in the arts right now who is struggling to keep our industry alive. I hear you & I see you.
> 
> Also, please feel free to ignore all my anachronisms and inconsistencies! I did not fancy searching up when telephones became commercially available or what leotards were made of, so I didn't.

_New York, 1895_

_“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”_

_\- Oscar Wilde_

* * *

It’s the same every Thursday.

A clink of ice, a roll of the dice.

“Sixteen.”

“Six- no. No, not this time. That is _too_ low.”

Across the polished mahogany table, which always seems both longer and shorter when Sebastien Raine is sitting on the other side of it, a sea of rich red smoking jackets and portly men with fat, round pocket watches chuckle, the ends of their cigars trailing ash onto the table.

“I paid you sixteen last time,” Sebastien reasons, leaning back in his chair.

David Rose slips off his shoes surreptitiously and digs his toes into the plush red carpet, the same color as the jackets two meters away. He can do it. He can deal with them tonight. He can throw Sebastien’s smug smiles and quiet, dangerous laughter back in his stupidly chiselled face.

“And I’ve since learned since that sixteen dollars for one night in my theatre is a thankless offer.”

Sebastien rolls the dice again when David picks his number. It’s a silly game that the former invented as a means to play with David on a Thursday night. Well, not in the traditional sense of playing; not playing in the way the other men do in the backroom of the Opera Rouge, where cigars trail shimmering smoke like the sea of a dance troupe’s feet and ice sings in glasses of whiskey well after the prima donna has bowed behind the curtain.

No, Sebastien plays with David like a child playing with a toy he’s about to grow out of.

The game is simple and stupid. Nowhere near as sophisticated as some of the ones invented by these owners and leaders and gallerists, these backroom gamblers. David will call a number between one and six. Sebastien rolls the dice. If it falls on the same number, then David gets to change Sebastien’s offer, no questions asked. If it falls one number higher or lower, David still gets to change it, but Sebastien can accept or decline the change. If it falls way out of David’s prediction, then –

“I’m sorry, David. It looks like my original deal stands.”

David lowers his gaze so that his eyeline isn’t steeped in the sharp, angry red of unsympathetic men. They find him so funny these days. Especially now, when he’s three glasses of rum too deep and trading away his nights at the Opera Rouge for sixteen dollars as though they were one of those ridiculous feathered hats in Macy’s. It’s not like he could afford to put anything on. And as unsavoury as the prospect was, what David had resorted to was letting himself fall yet again into one of Sebastien’s little games, accepting whatever money was thrown his way in exchange for Sebastien tainting the stage of David’s opera house with one of his hateful shows. He had half a mind to tell Robert to wax the floors until they slipped and leave the paper packets discarded by the audience crumpled in the seats.

That way, both literally and metaphorically, David’s career would be a mess.

David has been the director of the Opera Rouge for the past four years, and anyone from Benjamin Altman to the men who shined his shoes on the street could tell you that they had been the worst five years ever since his grandfather, Jonathan Rose Sr., opened the theatre on his twenty-first birthday. It was the first and finest of the Rose Collaboration, a group of eight theatres spread across the Upper East Side. They were huge, imposing, deep burgundy things, the awnings and frames decked magnificently in gold cladding. There was almost something possessive in the way they stood firm at each corner of the borough like the walls of a castle, guiding tourists home and sealing residents in.

In his time, David has seen many a starry-eyed visitor treat the Opera Rouge like a homecoming when they walk through the doors, all silk gloves and glasses. Sipping on their champagne daintily in the lush gold foyer. He envied that. He envied that walking into a theatre was occasion enough for some to drink champagne. Every inch of it – from the intricately carved skirting boards to the foyer windows to the empty brackets that hadn’t held candles since they installed an electric light – weighed down on his shoulders in a burden that made him feel terribly ungrateful. He’s always the last to arrive and the first to leave, the elusive director of grand shows that mean nothing to him.

And so, feeling three feet shorter – for all that he was sixteen dollars richer – David leaves the backroom of the Opera Rouge, the fresh biting air of the city welcome in his lungs after three hours in the company of brandy-breathed men who took up an uncomfortable amount of room in their poise and posture.

To most people, New York City in the winter is like being visited for Christmas by the black sheep of the family. A miserable affair had by all, followed by a desperate ushering out of the door when they simply don’t leave once the holidays are over. But David rather likes it. He’s the one who will sit with the estranged relative that rains down in sleet and bitter winds and embrace them when asked, because sometimes he feels like they’re the only one who understands him. He’s always felt at home in the cold. He wraps his long black scarf twice around his neck and begins the calm journey through Central Park, his only companions for the next few miles the distant singing of drunks and the stuttering of late-night hansom cabs on the ice.

Slipping ever so slightly as he reaches the door of his family’s townhouse, David manages to make it inside just before bitter hail begins to spit down on 69th Street. The chandelier is still lit when he shoves the heavy door closed behind him, and the outline of the polished marble floors and the opaline-blue chaises in the entrance are even more formidable by night than day. Something creaks upstairs and David can still smell the saltwater pool in the basement, not yet drained for the night. The staff are still up and about, putting the world to rights in the 20,000 square feet of neoclassical beauty. Or monstrosity, depending on who you ask.

The Roses bought the opulent six-bedroom townhouse from an international silk trader when David was twelve and have lived there ever since. While David has been clamouring to move out ever since he turned thirty, it’s not so much the decadence and ease of living that keeps him situated there but the fear for what comes afterward. He knows he’s going to buy a house like this one, just as grand if not even grander, and then…what? _Live_ in it, he supposes. Exist in it. Point his cigars at investors and snap his fingers for service. Move through the motions of a one-part ballet he is cursed to dance until he dies.

Shaking himself free of his thoughts, he finds himself moving up the stairs automatically to find solace in the one person who understands that this house is more a burden than a blessing.

He doesn’t bother knocking, he just wrenches open the door to his sister’s room. He knows just what she’ll be doing at this time of night. Leaning over her impossibly shiny boudoir, brushing the last traces of perfume from her hair and still dripping in last night’s diamonds, Alexis looks like a glass of champagne.

David sees her roll her eyes in the mirror and spin around when he enters unceremoniously.

“Can you not see the new doorbell outside my room, David?”

“Yes, and I think it’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” David retorts, clanging Alexis’ door shut so that the bell she’d had made for the side of it like the ones in the servant’s quarters jangles.

Alexis puts her hairbrush down and starts working on the clasps of her earrings and necklace, pooling them on the countertop and not seeming to do anything about the mess.

“If you leave them like that, the chains are going to kink and erode,” David says, clambering over the mounds of Alexis’ pink satin bedroom robe to put her diamonds back in their proper place. He catches a glimpse of her in the mirror, lids still painted with gold and a gentle blush on her cheeks. She looks just like she did after one of her Moira-mandated stage shows when she was eighteen, minus the swathes of flowers in the dressing room. She’s no less beautiful, but David knows she’s miles happier. He wonders where she’s been tonight.

“Anyway, do you want to tell me why you intruded today or do I have to work it out for myself?” Alexis presses, reaching for a cotton washcloth to take off her makeup.

“This morning you were asking me what I’m going to put on for my next big show at the Rouge,” David says, and he doesn’t miss the way Alexis’ face tightens in sceptical fear, “and I think I’ve made up my mind. I want it to be _Swan Lake.”_

There are so many responses running amok across her eyes, brow and the quirk of her lips there for the picking that Alexis doesn’t even have to say anything. David can see them as clear as day, and Alexis knows he can see them:

_That’ll be amazing for profits, it just got revived in St. Petersburg!_

_Are you sure, though? No one has put it on in New York before. You’re taking a risk._

_You have, like, no money right now, David. Again, you’re taking a risk._

_This is going to be a press disaster. You’ve tarnished the papers enough already. This’ll be the end of you._

_Oh my God, the costumes! It’ll be adorable!_

_You poor thing._

Instead, Alexis grabs her hairbrush again and half-combs her hair in a jerky motion, looking David up and down with a lift of her chin, not meeting his eyes.

“Well, um…what does Dad think?” is what she eventually says.

“I haven’t told him yet,” David says. “He has some meeting lined up for me tomorrow, I might drop it in then.”

“Drop what in? It’s just an idea, he’ll probably say no. No offence.”

David looks down at his hands. It’s only Alexis, and telling her will probably make him feel better, but a small thread of him that lives somewhere in the space between his vertebrae, runs ice cold with panic and regret.

“It’s not…just an idea, Alexis,” David says. “I’ve been planning it for a while. I have the, um…the licensing, and I’ve contacted the orchestra.”

“You just said you _think_ you want it to be _Swan Lake_. Does that mean ‘Alexis, we are definitely putting on _Swan Lake’_?”

“I –”

David stops himself before Alexis has the chance to interrupt him, but when he looks up he finds her with her fingers pressed to her temples, her eyes screwed shut in that familiar impatient look. It’s the same face that always makes him feel ridiculously immature, reminds him just how much his little sister has grown up in the three years since she got her new job.

“David…” she begins, but it’s the only word she utters for a while as she rubs at her forehead and mutters under her breath.

“If you’re going to tell me it was a bad idea to keep it secret, don’t waste your breath –”

“Ugh, Dad is going to _kill_ you, David!” Alexis looks much tireder than she did a minute ago and her voice is strained with something dangerously close to pity. “You don’t have the money or reputation for this! Do you know how hard it’s going to be to pull off one of _the_ ballets of the past few years on your budget?”

“Don’t remind me,” David says bitterly. “This is why I didn’t say anything! I’m tired of constantly having my ideas vetoed and Dad looking at me and doing that upset eyebrow thing. I just wanted to do _one_ thing by myself.”

“And you’re sure this is the right thing to do by yourself?” Alexis sits back, slipping out of her perfect posture. “You could have at least told me,” she adds in a small voice. And David wants to feel guilty, because from a brotherly stance he does, but professionally? Not in a thousand betrayals.

“You’re the press, Alexis,” he says. “I couldn’t hand over that kind of information. You wouldn’t have been able to hold onto it, legally. And then Sebastien or one of his fucking friends would have dug their little ‘experimentational theatre’ claws in and wrecked everything. Again.”

Alexis shoots him another look, this one plainly saying _you’re one to talk._ David isn’t exactly innocent of failed avant garde performances. It doesn’t feel like the version of him he is right now, though. He picks at a tiny thread at the edge of Alexis’ deliriously gaudy floral bedding, a rich ochre yellow stuffed with prints of roses and blueberry blossom.

There’s no money in risks. There’s no stability in pandering to people he doesn’t like for free drinks and VIP access. All he wants now is to make everything okay.

“I’ll tell him tomorrow,” David says firmly. “And if I can convince him to put the performance on, then you contact the arts agencies to put feelers out for a troupe. If not, then…”

Alexis shrugs at him, putting her hairbrush down for the final time and scooting David off her bed.

“Then…you go back in the theatre the next day and ask Sebastien for _seventeen_ dollars.”

David glares at Alexis. “Don’t be realistic.”

Alexis scoffs. “What else is there to be, David?”

* * *

What else, indeed.

David’s meeting with his father, originally set up by the Johnny as a meeting concerning the Opera Rouge’s finances, is worse than he could have expected.

When Alexis says “Dad is going to kill you,” that’s the universal Rose sibling definition for “Dad is going to be disappointed and upset, but still give you the means you need to get by while quietly slipping a zero off the end of your yearly inheritance.”

What they don’t expect, sat across from Johnny Rose in his pinstriped suit, is a flat, firm refusal to help.

“David, this is the last time I pay anything towards your ridiculous stints in that building,” he says, and David feels it like the pull and twist of the thinnest of knives in his gut; not enough to _hurt_ , just enough to displace everything beyond repair. “You can’t just steam ahead with an endeavour like that on your budget, no way! And a ballet, no less. Do you know how much more effort is needed to pull it off? Where do you expect to get the dancers?”

“This might be a stab in the dark, but I was going to say the dance academy,” David mutters.

Alexis is beside him, looking much keener than early this morning in a mauve waistcoat pinafore and floral green sleeves (her ‘work attire’, she said). Her hair is up in a tight chignon and a small green hat rests on the crown of her head. She ducks her face to hide her smirk at David’s words and plays with her purse strings. David can see she’s nervous too.

Johnny knocks back the last dregs of his brandy and sighs. “I’m sorry, son. I called you here to tell you that I’m worried about the Rouge’s numbers, and now this has done it for me. I won’t allow you to finance any more shows for the 95-96 season.”

And there it is. What David had been expecting to hear ever since the first roll of Sebastien’s dice.

He supposed his theatre would now be pawned off piece by piece to a man just as odious, if not Sebastien himself. He had nothing left to defend himself with.

There were a million excuses he usually pulled with his father, but he now realised that all he usually did was throw Johnny’s own words back in his face. _We’re Roses,_ was the age-old excuse. _We can do anything._ It was true. Usually, they could afford it. They could afford the repair for theatres damaged by vandals. The ransoms for the gangsters whose lives Alexis always seemed to be entangled up in. They were saving the noble Rose name from a dozen things a day, from everything except themselves.

Neither David nor Johnny say anything after that, but they don’t break eye contact as David stands up, his decorative cane swinging at his side as he slams the office door shut with more force than necessary. Before he leaves, he catches a glimpse of his father pinching the bridge of his nose and Alexis leaning forward to whisper “Really, Dad?”

It’s getting dark outside again. The few streetlights outside his father’s office are some of the last kerosene lamps in the city, and as David watches the lamp lighters climb their way up he thinks about how he’s going to miss the smell one day. If David could ever feel anything close to nostalgia, it might be related to those fresh puffs of gas on the cold winter air. Pulling his scarf tighter as he lifts his face to the warmth of them, he watches the loose telephone wires bobbing on the frigid, nipping wind.

He’s not in the mood to speak to anyone except a barman, and is glad his usual state of dress is keeping the right kinds of people at a safe distance. And of course, by the right kinds of people he means _all_ people. There’s something about David’s favoured combination of a black deadman hat with its white speckled feather sticking from the side, a huge fur trimmed raincoat that brushes the concrete and white buttoned spat shoes that pushes people away and makes them whisper as he passes. The unapproachable owner of the failing Opera Rouge, gambling away his father’s hard-earned empire to manipulative criminals.

He doesn’t care one bit.

David crosses the street and turns a couple of blocks with a very mental intention to go to the Elmdale Gentleman’s Club, but is surprised to find himself nearing the Rouge with every step. He tries to turn around, but the further he goes the compulsion to head towards his theatre grows stronger.

And until he’s stood at the stage door of the theatre, key in hand, David isn’t sure why he’s going inside. There’s something pulling him towards the twists and turns that lead to the green room and the steps to the private boxes and the performer’s lavatories, something _forcing_ him through the belly of the theatre, squeezing through all its dark, dusty secrets.

He doesn’t stop until he’s reached the first row of the dress circle, running his hand lightly along the crushed red velvet balcony. The room feels cold without the candles. It always has since the electric light was installed. He looks up and the ceiling is tall, cavernous; as domed and formidable as the Notre Dame was when he’d stood just like this, head back in awe, while on a visit to Paris last summer. It’s painted with trumpeting cherubs and clouds, and a marvel to look at when the lights are on. The interior of the theatre is like a performance in itself, one the audience dance their way through from the first check of tickets at the door to the pop of their parasols at the end of the night.

David sits himself down in one of the nearest seats, then jumps up again in shock when a sudden clatter from the pits catches his attention. There’s some muffled swearing, then more and more voices, and suddenly the whole pit is as alive as it is on a show night.

A familiar, cheerful-yet-passive-aggressive voice breaks him out of his fright, as well as coaxes him down from the possibility of intruders:

“Wendy, I just wanna slap you right across the face!”

There’s a sizzle of light and the candles in the pit are lit. David watches Jocelyn, the maestro of his favoured orchestra for the Rouge’s performances, step into position. As usual, she’s struggling to manoeuvre her huge purple bustle and outrageously high, years-out-of-style hair around to the conductor’s podium.

Wendy is muttering apologies for dropping her cymbals, Ivan is barking about something David can’t understand, Ted is laughing heartily and suddenly David feels a little less alone. He’s never in the theatre much when there isn’t anything on, so he often forgets that he lends the space to the orchestra on weeknights to practice. They can’t see him from their concealed position, but David rests his arms on the balcony and watches them contentedly.

“Listen, please, everyone! I know we’re all very eager to get started on the score for _Swan Lake –_ ” _I’ll tell them tomorrow,_ David thinks with a pang of guilt in his gut – “but I haven’t received word from David yet about acquiring the scorebooks. So for the meantime, today’s practice will be a bit of fun to keep the wheels turning! Ivan’s brought everyone some bagels to enjoy, and on the theme of the next performance I thought we’d play a little something that my good friend Camille showed me while I was in London.”

David smiles and shakes his head. Every other word of Jocelyn’s stories about her musical adventures abroad are always illustrated with a wink and a satisfied smile. She’s obsessed with Saint-Saens’ newest exclusive ensemble, as is everyone who is important enough to have heard it at some private event or another.

“Pianists and first cello to the 13th movement, please! We’ll start with _The Swan,_ shall we?”

Contrary to most theatres, there’s one window inside the Opera Rouge. It’s only uncovered for a couple of nights a month, because when the full moon shines at showtime its angle creates a soft, natural spotlight right in the centre of the stage. David wishes there were something on tonight because the moon is still as full as last night, which was the closing performance of his poorly received _Ruddigore,_ and the spotlight will surely still be there. The band tunes up before the simple, melancholy tenor clef of _The Swan_ starts to swell through the theatre, crystalline and heartbreaking. God, David wonders why Saint-Saens ever called it a joke.

And he’s _almost_ too wrapped up in the soft opening of the music to notice it, but he still does.

A quick, whooshing sound.

A tug of a rope.

The curtain comes up.

Someone hooks the rope up and ties it expertly.

And then they start to dance.

Stunned, bewildered, David is frozen to the spot. He wants to shout out, to let them know he’s there, to threaten this intruder that the director of the Rouge will personally escort them out and ban them for life, but…

_God._

The dancer starts en pointe for the first four bars, perfect with a muted naturality to it that tells David the movement comes more from pure talent than excessive training. Gliding across the stage, gently rippling as though suspended on water, arms outstretched behind them –

They come into the soft spot of moonlight.

No, arms outstretched behind _him,_ David realises with a silent gasp, transfixed as he turns into a posé at the end of the violin’s second phrase. His arms are taut with the effort of keeping them swimming above his head, but they look like they’re suspended gently by string, so fluid are his movements.

In all his years of watching dance troupes perform, David doesn’t think he’s ever seen this solo before. He can’t see the dancer’s face, but they look nowhere near as polished and professional as some of the Nutcracker Princes and King Florestans who have graced his stage before. And for that, it looks all the more mesmerising. He’s not _thinking._ He’s making this up on the spot, all these truly, truly _perfect_ forms of dance, colouring the air with unspoken words, illuminated by the light of the _moon,_ for God’s sake, and it’s not long before David is clamping his lips together and letting the tears run free and unbidden down his face.

He’s never seen art like this. Not to one of his favourite pieces of all time. The dancer is mimicking the actions of a dying swan, now closer to the floor with his leg outstretched, as beautifully sorrowful as the music.

David has to get a closer look. He has to. Without daring to take his eyes off the stage for a second, he edges away from the balcony and descends from the dress circle to the wings, catching the spellbinding moonlight variation from another angle. From here, the man is much clearer. His leotard is a pale, dusty blue, not worn out but certainly not new, and his hair is curled into dark auburn licks with sweat and the light drizzle David had felt starting when he was outside. He hasn’t the height and stature of some of the prima danseurs David knows (and the few that he _knows,_ as well), but the way he’s moving seems to be rewriting David’s very definition of art with every poise and turn. His torso and thighs are thick and defined, like someone who learned their quick movement and endurance from tossing crates at the dockyard rather than at the barre of their parent’s private dancing room.

 _The Swan_ comes to an end in the same way it always does, leaving David feeling full and empty at the same time. It’s a cycle of life, that piece of music, but something in it this time feels very much not like the end.

The dancer is almost bent in half on the floor of the stage, soft and pearl-pale in the light of the moon, his saltwet hair glistening darkly. David doesn’t dare make a sound. He knows the orchestra can’t see him either, so he is completely at peace. Alone, as far as he knows. David knows from experience that disturbing a dancer mid-act is like waking a sleepwalker.

Slowly, very slowly, the dancer comes out of his final pose and gently shakes himself off. As the orchestra talk over their feedback and ready themselves for a swift transition into the fifth movement, the dancer looks out towards the audience, to its thousand red velvet seats, the yearning on his face reaching miles beyond the back row.

And in a swift movement that nearly wrenches David’s heart from his chest, he takes a bow.

Just when he can’t take any more of this private beauty, David rewinds his scarf around his neck and makes to leave. He’s halfway turned around when the dancer beats him to it and catches his eye, still centre stage.

David holds up a hand, tries to think of something to say, but the dancer is frozen in fear. David can tell there are a million excuses on the tip of his tongue. If only David had the words of his own to tell this man he doesn’t need to hear any of them.

“You –” David starts, and he’s not entirely sure what he was going to say; it could have been _you can stay_ or _you don’t need to be sorry_ or _you’ve just singlehandedly destroyed and rebuilt my entire perception of art._

None of it matters, because the dancer has hurried off already. David feels the fabric of their clothing brush together for a fraction of a second, pushing his shirt and coat closer to his skin before he’s gone. David doesn’t think twice before following him down the stairs, past the locked doors of dressing rooms and the cold lavatory with its thick lead pipes. He wonders if the stage door was left open after he came in, and that’s how –

“Oof!”

“Oh my God –”

“I’m sorry, I just –”

“No, it was me, I –”

David blinks rapidly, the room coming back into focus after his sudden head-on collide. The dancer is bent down, picking up the flat cap and coat he dropped in the crash. He’s already shoved a rumpled blue boiled shirt and some denim work trousers over his leotard. He’s catching his breath from the dancing and the running away and now the slam into David’s chest, his face ruddy and sheened with sweat, and David thinks he might trade all the one-night exclusives at the Vienna State for just one more sight of this.

This, the most beautiful man he’s ever seen.

It’s a moment before David realises that the man is staring at him expectantly. His face is still tinged with worry.

David screws his eyes shut and holds up a hand. “Okay, I – first of all, um. Sorry. I should’ve watched where I was going.”

His shoulders untense a little. He ducks his head and smiles sheepishly, and it’s all David can do not to melt on the spot. He takes off his hat and runs the rim of it around and around in his cold fingers, stroking along the speckled feather like he often finds himself doing when he’s at a loss for words.

“And I’m sorry,” the man says. “I shouldn’t even be here. I – I wasn’t breaking in or anything, usually someone always leaves some door or another unlocked.”

“For goodness’ sake, I really need to get that checked,” David mutters automatically. The man’s face colors in horror.

“Oh God, you’re the owner, aren’t you? God, okay. I’m so sorry. I’m embarrassed. Think it’s best if I just leave now –”

“No!”

David stops moving his hat in his hands. A moment passes and the man inches closer, shifting a thin sack higher over his shoulder. The outline of the fabric makes David think there are boots inside, and yep, this man is still barefoot on the uninsulated floor of the very back of the theatre. He doesn’t seem to mind.

“What’s your name?”

“Why?” he blurts suddenly, then frowns. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. It’s, um, it’s Patrick. Patrick Brewer.”

David backs up the stairs.

“Wait, where are you going?” Patrick says urgently.

David rolls his eyes. “For the last time, I _promise_ you’re not in trouble,” he says. “I’m just going to get the directory from my office. Which agency are you with?”

Pause.

“I don’t know what that means.”

Another pause. This time, it’s on David’s end.

“You…don’t have an agent?”

Patrick shakes his head, again looking vaguely as though he thinks he’s done something wrong. For a moment, David wonders if he’s lying to show off.

“And you never trained professionally.”

“No – well. Not since I was a child. I had a few lessons, and then…” Patrick trails off, leaving David to fill in any possible blank of _we came into hard times_ or _my parents lost their jobs_ or any other reason why this man abandoned his lessons and yet is somehow still the best dancer David has ever seen in his entire life.

Faintly, the orchestra are working their way through some other movements of _The Carnival of the Animals,_ oblivious to the altercation. David finds himself stepping slowly back towards Patrick and before he knows it he’s guiding him outside, pulling back at the last second before realising he was reaching out to put his hand on the small of Patrick’s back.

The wind has settled down into a mild nip, one just enough to keep Patrick from shivering in his thin clothes, his stocky arms half-bare and even paler in the fresh moonlight. He looks a little like a newsboy, David thinks, with that flat cap and his brown donkey jacket balled up in his hands.

“If you, um – if you don’t mind me asking. What on earth were you doing in there?”

Patrick ducks his head again, this time allowing himself something like a self-indulgent smile now that he knows he’s not in any trouble. “I would sometimes hear the orchestra practicing when I was on my way home from work and I could see from the lights when there was a show on. When there wasn’t, I tried to come in one night to see what was going on, and the backdoor to the pit was unlocked. I’ve kinda been sneaking up here for the past couple of, um…well, it’s been about a year now. Two years? No, one and a half.”

David stops in the street. He’s not quite sure where they were walking towards in the first place.

“Hold on. You’re telling me that you’ve been sneaking into my theatre because the orchestra always forget to lock the pit door when they come in for practice…and practicing dance on the stage…for _eighteen months?”_

Patrick winces. “Yes? I know I’m not great, but I don’t have much space at home. If it bothers you, I promise I’ll stop. I can save up for lessons again.”

Once David has managed to climb his way out of the steadily growing warmth for this man to return to his rational thoughts, he shakes his head and wonders how casually he can let Patrick know just how incredible he is.

“‘Not great’? Patrick, that was – you were –”

Nothing comes, so David sticks his hands out and gestures at the ground, the night sky, the glimmering black water of the dockyard that’s just coming into view.

“I’d be happy for you to stay,” David finally manages. “In fact, _please_ stay. It’s nice to know there’s someone getting good use out of that stage.”

As they approach the metal pipe railing separating the concrete walkway from the water, Patrick shoots David a sidelong glance. “Huh. That sounds…troubling. You wanna talk that one through, or…?”

Despite himself and all the misery his career is bringing him, David smirks at Patrick’s tone. He might be emanating insecurity and lingering embarrassment at the moment, but there’s this impatient, sure-of-himself air framing everything he says and does that is silently driving David mad. He loves it.

“Suffice it to say that business is _not_ good at the minute,” David says, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “But that’s not important. I’m still wondering why you haven’t got yourself in with an agency yet.”

Patrick slows down, his hand trailing along the metal railing. He lifts his palm when he reaches the end. It’s grimed and black.

“I don’t think they tend to take people like me, if I’m honest. I have no credentials.”

“What does that matter?” David says, waving a hand. “If you’re good, they let you in. I thought that was how it always worked.”

Patrick scoffs. It’s not unkind, but…it’s not _not_ unkind. David braces himself for a lecture, but when Patrick speaks his voice is surprisingly small. Defeated.

“Not with the clothes I have, or the private academy I didn’t go to. I’ve tried, believe me. I tried a lot when I got here, and it was no use.”

The path narrows, pushing them closer together. Patrick clears his throat and looks across the short neck of river to the church on the other side nestled behind stray stores and houses, its clock bright and shining.

“Um. What exactly is it we’re doing along this path?” David asks, his voice tentative and gentle in the wake of Patrick’s vent.

“I live near here,” Patrick responds, raising an arm to the blocks of red brick apartments towards the end of the path. “I was just kinda dawdling, and you…”

“Followed,” David says. He hopes Patrick doesn’t catch the rising blush on his cheeks.

Luckily, he’s too distracted by the quiet chime of church bells on the other side of the road: midnight. Patrick’s face falls.

“Damn it, I have to go. I’m up at five tomorrow. Well, today.”

David balks. “ _Five?_ Ugh, why?”

“Work,” Patrick says simply. He picks up the pace and this time David doesn’t follow him, but Patrick turns around to face him anyway.

“Oh, and David?” he calls. “Uh…thank you. For not kicking me out, or whatever.”

Patrick raises his hand to the distant theatre, his smile humble and almost like a frown.

“I’m not done with this place,” he says.

The frown turns into a full-toothed, bashful laugh, and David feels it pierce him like shards. Like the swell of music in the finale of a first act. It’s a smile that gets caught on the water, sticks itself in the metal railings, clambers up the trees and sparks the area up with a light it never usually has.

And as Patrick turns away, shivering and pulling his battered brown jacket over his shoulders, David stares after him for a long, long time. Until the clock across the river threatens one o’clock. And he hopes, with a clinging, foreign pang in his chest that he hasn’t felt for years, that this _isn’t_ the finale of the first act. He hopes that this is them bantering behind in the wings, entangled in the curtain with no one else around to shut them up.

He knows this isn’t the end.

In fact, he’s going to make sure of it.

* * *

There are three things David can rely on when he’s still fretting about a chance encounter the night before well over twelve hours later: the solace of a quiet house, its owner, and her wine and hemp cigarettes.

“The kid’s got balls, I’ll give him that,” Stevie says, pouring a generous helping of white wine into the fancy decanter David had gifted her one Christmas. “Breaking into your theatre to dance his little feet off and keeping it on the low for a year and a half? I like him. Don’t know him, but I like him.”

“He wasn’t ‘breaking in’. Not really.” David takes the wine from Stevie and burrows himself further into her hideous tartan armchair. “To be honest, it’s not like it was hard. The orchestra always leave the back door unlocked, and it’s not like they can see or hear him anyway.”

Stevie tuts as though she knows something David doesn’t. Reaching into the breast pocket of her suit, a beautifully tailored purple velvet coat with tails, she pulls out a metal cigarette case. David can smell the strong, earthy, sour scent from the other side of the living room.

“Ah, so I see you’ve already reached stage four of the David-Rose-is-besotted cycle,” Stevie says knowingly, crossing the hardwood floor to hand David a cigarette and striking a match against the mantlepiece to her right. He holds it between his lips as she lights it and drags deeply.

“This part of the cycle usually comes much later,” Stevie goes on, as though David doesn’t know a damn thing about himself. She lights her own hemp and plops herself down in the armchair adjacent to David’s. “You start picking faults with the person in question to justify distancing yourself from them.”

“You sound like a psychologist,” David grumbles, but there’s no bite in it. He takes another deep drag of his cigarette. The smoke fills his lungs slowly, smooth and warm. It’s calming.

“You know you need to hear it.”

“Hmph.”

Stevie takes a sip of her wine, sighing with appreciation once she’s swallowed. The fire between their two armchairs is finally starting to catch onto the coal and old crumpled newspaper. The layer of frost outside, the first of the year, is definitely cause enough for it. When David turned up at her doorstep half an hour ago, the tips of his fingers were blue.

“Know what I’m gonna get you to do now?” Stevie says, leaning forward. “Tell me something _nice_ about him. You always sound so offended by anyone who catches your attention.”

David makes an impatient noise and shrugs, trying not to let on that he’s burning up inside at the thought of Patrick’s lopsided smile and the shy yet carefree way he carried himself down the street.

“What is there more to tell? Some guy basically invaded _my_ business and then ran off after we talked outside.”

Stevie gives him a pointed look.

“You know I don’t believe you for a second, right?”

“Yes. Yes, I know that – _ugh,_ fine. I may have literally shed a tear because I have never seen anyone dance that way in my entire life, we had a pleasant walk outside before he had to leave for an early shift, and his eyes make me want to set my head on fire.”

 _“There_ it is!” Stevie says triumphantly, pointing at David with such vigor that her wine sloshes over the side of the glass. “I knew it. I knew no one called Patrick Brewer could be anything other than an actual teddy bear.”

David couldn’t have suppressed the smile that comes out of him next even if he tried. It starts in his chest, a sudden wave of euphoria and giddiness that he forgets the origins of for a moment, before he remembers. _Patrick._

“Stevie…” David says, his voice a pathetic little half whine. “Stevie, he was so _good.”_

“Then why don’t you talk to him again?” Stevie insists. “Jeez, you know where he’s going to be every Friday night. At least make the man happy and refer him to a talent scout.”

“That’s not the way things work, according to him. He says they won’t accept him if they know he hasn’t been professionally trained or doesn’t look _up to scratch,_ or something.”

He says the last part with a disgust that surprises him. Even when he’s not here, Patrick is still dismantling the things David thought he knew about the industry he’s lived and breathed since he was a boy. Stevie, on the other hand, seems unfazed. She’d grown up well below David’s means, yet managed to forge a very comfortable life for herself through a career as Johnny’s financial advisor (a job that had been her great aunt’s position before she drank the Budd name into near ruin).

“You don’t think you could get my dad to help him out, do you?”

Stevie snorts. “Yeah, good luck getting your father back on board when he hears you want to fund an unknown, uneducated dancer for – wait, what exactly is it you want him to do?”

The question stops David short for a moment. He’d been so wrapped up in his overlapping thoughts of Patrick that he’d barely spared a thought for what he actually wanted the man for.

But as suddenly as the uncertainty is there, it’s gone. There are things in its place, though they dance in and out of his mind’s eye like the fluttering of white feathers in and out of his moonlight stage. The plumes of chalk dust kicked up by pointe-clad toes. The low, mellow twang of instruments tuned just a little left of perfect. The warm buzz of the audience, rustling their paper bags of peanuts and popcorn. Ronnie in the rafters above the stage, grumbling as she adjusts the spotlights just so.

The light of those spotlights falling on a single figure, poised and ready in third position, decked in a shining white leotard and crowned in twigs and feathers and stars.

The Swan King.

“I think…”

David swallows dryly, then gulps back the rest of his wine.

“I think I want him as the lead.”

Stevie’s brow furrows, then shoots into her hairline.

“What, as – as Odette?”

David nods slowly once, then twice. Then faster. Articulating the idea roots it further into his brain, until he can’t fathom how he ever thought without it sitting, patient and cross-legged, in the most peaceful part of his mind.

“Yes.” He responds as easily and obviously as if Stevie had asked him if his name was David.

Stevie looks a hundred things at once; excited, moved, intrigued, but there’s something tugging at the corners of her mouth to prevent it turning into one of those dazzling sincere smiles. She looks optimistic and pessimistic at the same time.

“It’s like with the cabaret last year, isn’t it?” Stevie says, her tone small and a little too defeated for David’s liking. “You had all these amazing acts lined up and everything planned out, but no funds to do it with.”

“That was different. Sebastien was playing around with my money back then.”

“What, more than he is now?”

David sighs. Ever since he inherited the theatre, he’s been anything but immune to the temptation of people whose attention he used to prize. There’s always been someone charming him into reduced prices, bribing untalented warblers onto the stage because they’re the daughter of Mr. Moneybags. There’s always been people breathing down his neck, manipulating their way to David’s bed just to try and take a chunk out of him. After five years of it, he’s not sure there’s much more of him left standing.

But yesterday…something changed. Something clicked. Something felt _right._

David can’t recall ever, ever feeling like that inside a theatre before. Seeing the artwork he’d tried to tie together with money his whole life being laid bare so starkly, so earnestly…it changed something for him. If someone had told him that the theatre had been uprooted in the time he had been inside it and was transported to the edge of a lush, rocky outcrop in rural Canada while he was watching Patrick dance, then he thinks he might have believed them.

“No. No,” David says firmly. Stevie stops pouring her second glass of wine and blinks at him.

“No to the opera, or…?”

“No to anyone who’s ever thought they can treat me like a joke.” Once Stevie has finished pouring, he snatches the wine off her and takes a long sip. “I’m done with failing at this career. I’m done with Sebastien. I’m done with _not winning.”_

Impressed, Stevie chuckles at him. “Out of all the ways I thought this season was going to go, that was not one of them.” She tilts her head at David, her eyes shining. “I haven’t seen you like this since we had a showcase.”

“A showcase…” The word feels foreign in David’s mouth. It’s been so long since he had _fun_ in the theatre. “You know what, Stevie?”

Stevie nods, her smile widening.

It’s exactly the kind of thing that would get his dad on board. A bit of nostalgia from when Johnny actually believed David was making an effort to run the theatre. Their circle of performers and friends affectionately called it an “open mic”; it was like an informal audition they would put on before the real preparation for a show begun. Investors and press would sit sparsely in the stalls and watch what New York’s newest graduates from the Institute of Musical Art had to offer. There was singing, improvised comedy, even circus acts. If David’s main benefactors could be convinced that he was capable of finding a strong enough cast for a show, then they would make him funding offers.

“That settles it, then,” Stevie decides, slapping her hands to her thighs before standing up. “We’re putting on a showcase. I’ll contact Alexis to get her to send out a note to all the usuals.”

“Any excuse,” David mutters. Stevie swats a hand at him, blushing.

“Shut up.”

“I wonder if this’ll end like the last showcase with you and Alexis behind the curtain at the afterparty –”

“I said shut up!”

* * *

David doesn’t go gambling the next Thursday. And when Sebastien’s cheque for sixteen dollars turns up at the door, he returns it to sender.

Stevie had a whole method in place for finding Patrick and convincing him to perform in the showcase. She would find out where he lived from the local worker’s registers, try and ambush him at his own home and offer him whatever monetary value necessary if he refused.

David, on the other hand, was content to wait outside the theatre like a stray puppy, too embarrassed to walk in and make it known that he was desperate to watch Patrick dance again.

Of course, neither plan had the chance to be executed, because come Friday morning David is caught off guard while walking past the dockyard by a familiar pair of arms and the same rolled-up blue shirt.

He’s not certain for a moment whether or not it _is_ Patrick, but then –

“Put some back into it, Brewer! We’re not ballet dancing, here!”

The stocky auburn figure tossing crates at the dockyard smiles a private smile. Yep, that’s him.

David pulls his scarf loose and wipes his palms of the sweat that’s suddenly collected there. He’s content to stand and watch – if he doesn’t get a chance to speak now, at least he’ll be seeing Patrick tonight – then a large brass bell is rung and the workers jump off duty, immediately replaced by another set of men. Patrick hurries to the end of the dock where the workers have dumped their coats, rummaging around until he pulls out a metal tin. With a sigh that David can see from here in the puff of cold air that clouds from his mouth, Patrick sits himself down against a concrete bollard, and David slowly descends the narrow steps from his tree-lined path to the dockyard.

Even just a couple of feet down, the cold is even more biting. David puts his scarf back on, the ever-nearing sight of Patrick filling him with warmth.

“You know, sitting like that will wreck your posture. No good for a dancer.”

Patrick is about to open his tin when he looks up, eyes scanning the path frantically for the familiar voice. David bites down hard on a fond smile at how adorable he looks. When they finally lock eyes, Patrick’s face softens. He gestures to David with the tin.

“And you know, coming down here to mix with us common folk will wreck your reputation. No good for business.”

David is surprised to find himself almost jogging the rest of the distance. He hasn’t jogged since he attempted to run track in his first year at Trinity.

“Good day?” David says, just for something to say.

Patrick shrugs. “It’s work,” he says. He opens his tin. There’s a corned beef sandwich in one half of it and half a clementine and some pickles in the other. A piece of paper flutters out in a gust of wind. David manages to catch it and hand it back to Patrick, who snorts at it and shakes his head fondly as though he’s used to getting pencil drawings of middle fingers with his lunch.

After a couple of bites of his sandwich, David realises he’s just been staring at Patrick absentmindedly. Before Patrick can look up and get weirded out, David starts.

“Sorry, I didn’t even tell you why I came down here in the first place.”

Patrick smiles, and the force of it is like the overture to a show David feels like he’s been waiting for his entire life.

“What, my irresistible charm wasn’t reason enough?”

“Oh, not _nearly_ enough,” David says, nodding along faux-seriously to Patrick’s playful frown. “Anyway, this is important. I have a proposition for you.”

“Oh?”

“How would you like to dance in a showcase at the theatre in a weeks’ time?”

Halfway through biting into a pickle, Patrick stops and stared at David blankly. He doesn’t say anything until he’s slowly chewed his way through the rest of it.

“I…you – I – you want me to –”

“Yes, why –”

“I can’t do that, David.”

David’s heart sinks, and then sinks even lower when the same look of self-deprecating defeat that he saw last week clouds over Patrick’s features once again.

“What happened to me needing an agency?”

David shrugs. “Well, some of the performers there will be sent from the performing arts schools –” Patrick groans, and David holds up a hand – “but this is essentially an open call. We invite anyone to come and showcase themselves to our investors, to show them we have the potential to put on a great show.”

What was once insecurity on Patrick’s face is now utter disbelief. He looks almost calm, as though he’s already come to terms with something that could never happen, even when David is holding it towards him. All he needs is for Patrick to reach out and take it.

“I…I couldn’t possibly,” Patrick says quietly. “There’s no way anyone in the crowd would look twice.”

“I already did.”

Though it’s not a confession, it feels like one. Patrick meet’s David’s eye. David stares back harder.

“Patrick, from what you’ve told me, it sounds like you’ve danced on that stage more than any other person.” As he says it, the truth of that simple fact dawns on them both. It moves David more than he expected it to. “If you want, you can pretend no one is there but me.”

Patrick, who David is starting to realise is a stubborn bastard, tries to argue back again. But there’s too much hope in his voice now for David to fall for it.

“I don’t even have a good enough leotard,” he tries feebly.

“Well, where did you get your first one?”

Patrick hesitates for a moment, then, “My, uh, cousin made it for me. When we first moved here. It’s a little worn now, I guess.”

“It doesn’t matter,” David says. “If I hear anyone say a thing about it, I’m kicking them out.”

David’s sure Patrick doesn’t want to be patronised or sheltered, but sometimes the world calls for it. If any of the bitchy undergraduates from the academy even raise an eyebrow at Patrick wrong, David would have no qualms in making sure they never got a chance to set foot in his theatre again.

Patrick sighs. “Okay, David. What date is it on?”

 _There_ it is. The start of the first act.

David smiles. “Tell me your address and I’ll get someone to send you the details.”

Patrick uses the back of the paper drawing and the stub of a pencil he had in his back pocket to scrawl down his address for David. The bell rings again. David backs away as Patrick scrambles away, hastily stuffing the last segment of clementine in his mouth before he gets back to work.

David ascends the dockyard steps and continues the walk he intended to take, his hands clenching and unclenching in his pockets restlessly. He finds himself dissecting every inch of the conversation, marking every smile and nuance of Patrick’s expression and committing it to memory.

And there was something about the way he said ‘cousin’ that reminded David of an old lover who would postpone David’s companionship for fictitious family members who actually turned out to be a secret wife. But as soon as the thought comes, it goes, and David goes back to thinking about Patrick’s gentle Canadian voice and breathy laugh, clutching to the address in his pocket tighter as he makes his way down the green path.

***

Despite having his address, David makes no move to visit Patrick the next week, instead giving the address to Stevie and letting her send Patrick the information about the showcase. He doesn’t want to breathe down his neck, not when this could be the most important night of his life.

Correction: this _is_ going to be the most important night of Patrick’s life, because David’s going to make sure of it.

In fact, he has it underlined on the paper in front of him.

“David, are you still playing around with that crusty old sheet of paper? You haven’t done the auditions yet. You haven’t even done the _showcase_ yet.”

Without looking up, David shoots the finger at Alexis, coming into the dining room with a stack of work papers in her hands.

“These are just my predictions based on who I know is looking for work at the moment,” David says.

Alexis looks over his shoulder. “Who the hell is Patrick Brewer?”

“None of your business,” David snaps. She’ll know soon enough, anyway. Everyone will.

“Also, it’s just Mutt,” Alexis corrects. “Not Matthias or…Mutthew, or whatever it is you have written there.” She looks closer. “Ew, _Klaire?_ Woof, David. Oh, she’s playing the Black Swan. Never mind –”

“Okay, can you stop reading over my shoulder now?”

David folds up his paper and stuffs it in his pocket, turning back to his quickly cooling coffee and eggs. At the same moment Alexis seats herself opposite him, looking over her work between bites of pancake, Johnny and Moira sweep into the dining room, clearly buzzing about the events of the day ahead.

“David, darling, I cannot _wait_ to become acquainted with this cohort of protegees you seem to have cumulated from thin air!” Moira bends down theatrically and plants a wet kiss to David’s cheek. “Plenty of new recruits to keep me occupied. Do let me know if you require Mother’s expertise.”

“Won’t be necessary, thank you so much,” David mutters through clenched teeth.

Johnny, socially constipated as ever, rubs his hands together and nods towards David as though they were British gentlemen tipping their hats in the street. “So, ah, the showcase tonight, son. What about that, huh?”

David just gives a little hum of acknowledgement. He’s not in the mood to entertain his father’s attempts at making nice after he told him in not so many words the other week that he was willing to sit back and watch David’s business crumble. He knows Johnny still isn’t completely on board, but he couldn’t deny the spark of life in his father’s eye when he had first gone to him with the idea.

God, he hopes Patrick turns up.

Even if it it’s in his scruffy leotard and untamed hair. Hell, _especially_ if it’s in his scruffy leotard and untamed hair, if only for David’s viewing purposes.

The telephone in the hall rings out, loud and grating. David takes a last bite of his breakfast and hops out into the foyer, knowing exactly who it’s going to be.

“Stevie?” he says as he pulls the receiver off the wall. “Is everything okay?”

“Calm down,” Stevie huffs. “I was just calling to let you know that everyone’s RSVP’d for tonight, with a couple of last-minute cancellations.”

David winces. “And?”

Stevie is frustratingly polite on the other end of the line. “And what, David?”

“You know what I want to know! Is he coming or not? Did he cancel last minute?”

“I’m pleased to inform you that…I know the answer to that question. And you don’t. Good morning, David.”

The line clicks, and Stevie is gone. David grumbles at nothing in particular, slamming the brass earpiece down with a rattle.

Back in the dining room, it’s business as usual with Moira getting worked up about a bead falling off one of her four-foot-tall wigs, Johnny rustling his newspaper and making digs about his industry rivals, and Alexis shouting at both of them to shut up while she revises edits for a news briefing intended for that afternoon.

David sighs, picks up his plate, and rings for some coffee to be delivered to his bedroom. It’s going to be a long twelve hours.

* * *

It’s a long twelve hours.

David spends most of it eating and trying to get through the new Stephen Crane novel, his vain attempts peppered with multiple attempts to call Stevie. The telephone hasn’t been installed in their house for very long, and David forgets how to use it every other day. He doesn’t dare think about what Johnny might do to it if he were to touch it.

But the time goes by eventually, as it tends to do. Even if it means David is jittery and crabby by the time they turn up to the theatre. Alexis and Moira are in their winter furs and David is half-drowning in the coat his parents gave him as an eighteenth birthday present when they’d visited Moscow. Now that David thinks about it, that was the first time he had seen _Swan Lake,_ too. Returning to the theatre with the ballet in mind while wearing it takes the edge off his bad mood.

The Roses seat themselves loudly. David moves them three times so that they’re not blocking any of the investors or agents in the crowd, then heads backstage to check on the performers.

Almost immediately, he runs into Stevie and a dancer, ready in a recognisable floral camisole dress and beige pumps. David’s heart warms at the sight. He knows Twyla can afford much better, but every showcase she still chooses to wear the very first dress that she made herself.

She squeals when she sees David, clapping her hands together. “Hi, David! I haven’t seen you in ages! Oh, this is going to be such a fun night.”

Though still distracted, David offers her a warm smile. “You’re going to do wonderful, Twyla. I can’t wait to see it.” He turns to Stevie immediately, his gaze hardening. “Are you finally going to tell me if he’s here, or not?”

Stevie shrugs. “Introductions are happening in five minutes. Sit down and see for yourself.”

Stevie and David wish Twyla good luck before she hurries into the wings. David gripes at Stevie all the way back down the hall, trying to pull his arm out of her steely grip. She sits them down front row, and David sighs irritably as the orchestra start up and Roland, David’s events organiser at the Rouge, starts calling the names of the performers. They each come onto the stage and take a bow, some of them flourishing and trying to show off to get more attention. When they’re impressive it works, but for the most part the introductions just tire David.

“If you sat me down here knowing full well I’m going to be bored out of my mind, Stevie, you’ve –”

“Patrick Brewer, dancer!”

David’s heart stops. Patrick Brewer, _dancer,_ walks smoothly and confidently onto the stage, stopping in the middle and sweeping down into a simple bow. He makes eye contact with David at the very crux of the bow for the briefest of moments, and when he stands up David’s eyes follow him all the way. He’s shaved the scruff from his chin and trimmed his hair, and what he’s wearing is the furthest possible thing from his old blue leotard. It’s translucently white and impeccably made, and if David didn’t know better he would have suggested the very thing to use for the undergarment of a lead role.

After Patrick has left the stage and David has caught his tongue, he leans over to Stevie and mutters, “What…was he wearing?”

Stevie smirks. “You told me his cousin made the first one for him when they moved here, right? When you sent me his address, I may have sent over some good fabric just in case they were still living together, and…well, there you go.”

There’s something about Patrick being there that makes the rest of the performances exquisite. David doesn’t even get worried when one of the singers slips a note or a dancer misses a step, because he knows at some point Patrick will be there to patch things up. The investors and agents make notes, pointing out the dancers they want to speak to later and clapping politely when appropriate.

And then, at the very last act, just as David is starting to wonder if Patrick has gotten cold feet and has left, the orchestra put their instruments aside in the pits and make way for a single soloist to sit down at the piano.

All the other acts were introduced with a long list of their education and accolades, but as Patrick assumes his first position on the stage all Roland reads is, “And to close off our showcase for tonight, the Opera Rouge thanks you for your attendance and presents Patrick Brewer, dancing a variation of his own creation to Chopin’s _Nocturne No.1 in B flat minor.”_

The audience is more silent than it has been all night as Patrick dances. But it’s the loudest silence David has ever heard. He can _hear_ how they feel, can hear their astonishment and the ghosts of whispers that sound vaguely like _oh my God. This can’t be real. How is this real. Who is this._

David’s not really paying attention to them. All he can hear is the music that sounds as though it’s coming from Patrick’s own feet and the fluid sweep of his arms.

He’s not good. He’s nowhere near good.

He’s _radiant._

And David has been worried out of his mind all night about what Johnny thinks, but the look on his father’s face right now would convince anyone that he’d never seen ballet before he saw Patrick.

David thinks he might feel that way, too.

He finishes and bows again humbly, and is then stopped from leaving the stage by the rupture of applause. It’s louder than it has been all night, emanating from the wings and pit as well as the audience. Even Ronnie, tugging on her toolbelt, pops her head out of the rafters to see what all the fuss is about.

The performers take one, final joint bow, and by the time they’ve come back from the dressing rooms loosely covered in a mishmash of the clothes they arrived in the agents are on the stage waiting for them, clipboards and business cards poised and ready to pounce on their favourites.

David watches as four agents immediately clamour to Patrick’s side, and smiles at the look of bewilderment on Patrick’s face before he’s disturbed by a tap on the shoulder.

He turns around to see his father stood with a short, wiry-haired man who Johnny introduces as Tippy Bernstein. What comes out of their mouths shocks David so much that he barely hears it over his own ears ringing. He manages to tune back in at “…so whatever it is you need, son, whatever you want to put on, we’ll be here for you,” which David thinks is a good enough place to nod dumbly and murmur in thanks.

Soon after, the party is in full swing. The orchestra stick around after the showcase and have been playing whatever the hell they like ever since Jocelyn abandoned her conducting post to go talk to Moira. Some of the actors go home then return with cases of wine and champagne, the Rouge’s caterers bring in canapes and chocolates, and David can’t tear his eyes away from the look of fascination on Patrick’s face.

“How’re you feeling?” David says gently as he approaches.

Patrick swallows, gripping tightly to the glass of champagne in his hand. “I feel, um…fine.”

David’s eyelids fall half-closed. “You cannot be serious right now.”

“What? I do!”

“Someone with as much control over conveying emotion through art as you should be capable of articulating more than ‘fine’,” David says, though they’re both laughing.

“Don’t even bring dancing up right now, I’m so tired.”

David tilts his head at Patrick. “Hm. Do you fancy getting out of here and going somewhere else?”

Patrick raises an eyebrow, then looks to the wider room. To the people who’ve been trying to talk to him all night, congratulate him, to the people he’s been afraid of for a year and a half who now have nothing but praise for him.

“No, thanks. I’m okay for the moment.”

They separate for a while to mingle, and by the time they reunite they’re both slightly more relaxed and the orchestra have slowed their pace.

David sits down next to Patrick in his strange spot just at the edge of the wings. The stage is still full of people, laughing and dancing and throwing food into each other’s mouths. He swears there are a ton more people here than there were an hour ago. Word of mouth must have travelled to some of the dancer’s classmates or the rest of the gymnastics troupe.

He can feel the heavy presence of the semi-drawn curtain and the warmth of candles on his back. Without being fully aware he’s doing it, David slowly lowers his head onto Patrick’s shoulder, who tenses for a second before embracing the small act of intimacy and letting David stay.

“Thank you,” Patrick says quietly, and seemingly out of nowhere.

“…For what, letting me put my head on your shoulder?”

Patrick laughs softly. “No. For this. For giving me this opportunity. It’s been nice.”

“It’s _been_ nice? You say that like you’re done here.”

“I’m not done here?”

David lifts his head out of pure incredulity. “You cannot be serious right now. You think those agents – you think _I’m_ just going to let you go?”

Patrick is quiet. David looks him in the eye, and shakes his head.

He’s so _sure_ of himself. So achingly sure that there’s nothing more to him than shifts at the docks and secret dances at night. And there’s a part of David that wants to make him unsure, just for long enough that David gets to guide him gently towards figuring out who he is. What he wants from life.

He runs a gentle thumb across the shoulder of Patrick’s leotard, whispers something about the fabric that neither of them can hear, and he leans in.

And madly, miraculously, Patrick doesn’t lean away.

David cups his face, holding onto the kiss for just a moment longer before pulling away. He picks up the half-empty cup of wine from the floor between them and presses it into Patrick’s hands, then picks up his own.

Smiling slyly, he says, “To you.”

Patrick huffs out a laugh and rolls his eyes. “Fine. To me.”

Then, David’s feet move before his brain tells them to and he’s up off the floor, clapping his hands to get everyone’s attention. Auditions weren’t meant to be for another week, but fuck it, he’s feeling prepared.

“Excuse me, everyone!” he shouts. “All the dancers here tonight, if you’d like to audition for _Swan Lake_ at midday tomorrow then you’d better go home now. We have roles open for all except Odette.”

There’s a crescendo of excited screams as the dancers all process David’s information, then the majority of them scramble back to the dressing room to pick up the rest of their things and hurry out of the door.

Behind David, Patrick stands up warily. “Wait, so should I leave now –”

David puts a finger to Patrick’s lips and shakes his head. “You’re not auditioning.”

And _that_ was the wrong thing to say, wasn’t it, because Patrick’s face drops a mile. David claps his hand over his mouth when he realises how that sounded.

“Oh my God, no! No no no, don’t worry. Patrick, you’re already _in it.”_

“As…as Odette?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that a girl’s role?”

“Not anymore, it’s not.”

“Won’t people say things?”

“Let them.”

And as excited as David is for his show, he would give it all up for the look of hope and gratitude on Patrick’s face right now. He shouts out, “Everyone else, feel free to keep the party going!” just before Patrick pulls him behind the wings again, pressing another kiss to David’s lips. They stay behind the wings, talking between kisses for as long as they can, before Stevie is calling David’s name for more wine and Alexis wants a drunken dance with Patrick and the sun is creeping through the tiny spotlight window of the Rouge.

* * *

Cleaning the theatre for auditions the next morning is completed just in time for the first overeager auditionees to start loitering outside the front doors. The director, producer, creative assistant and David are sat in the middle of the stalls, papers in hand and ready to go after a thorough splash of cold water to the face. David looks across the aisle. He let Patrick stay and watch – as well as Stevie, who insisted out of curiosity. He’s sat adjacent to David across the aisle, wrapped in David’s coat and waiting intently for the auditions to begin.

They pass quicker than David expected, and by the end of the afternoon he’s managed to roughly assemble a list that looks uncannily like his original predictions. He leans over to Patrick, who is looking more entertained and at home than Patrick has ever seen him, smiling widely.

“Well, I don’t think we’re going to have any problem with –”

“Patrick Brewer?”

Frowning, Patrick spins around to the back of the theatre, where a front-of-house staff member is walking towards him with a note outside.

“We have someone outside waiting for you, concerned for your whereabouts.” The staff member squints down at the paper. “Rachel? Your wife? She says you didn’t come home last night.”

David feels like someone put their hands over his ears.

Feels his blood run cold.

He stares blankly at Patrick, who seems unfazed until he realises what’s been said out loud.

“David, I can explain –”

“Of course,” David whispers, almost to himself. He remembers the way Patrick had said ‘my cousin’ last week. A man had done that to him once before, pretending he didn’t have a wife just to see how far he could get with David. And with David’s money, for that matter.

He can’t let this happen again. He _won’t_ let this happen again. Not when everything is looking up.

But this time, the one thing that is making everything look up has also just forced everything back down again.

David nods slowly as the horrible déjà vu sits down on his chest like an elephant’s foot. The other audition panel aren’t paying attention, have no idea there’s anything untoward going on, but Stevie is looking at David gravely.

Of course this would happen to him now. Of _course_ it would.

“I have to go,” David mumbles, tripping over the armchairs in his hurry to get out.

“David!” Patrick calls, his voice straining with effort. “She’s –”

But David doesn’t hear the rest. Doesn’t let himself hear the rest. He’s already gone, headed on a one-track path to his bedroom, where he doesn’t emerge for what feels like days. He doesn’t even perk up when Alexis comes in tentatively, dropping her latest newspaper on his bed. He doesn’t even open the newspaper up. He just lets it sit twice folded on the end of his bed as he reads the emboldened name in the story again and again.

* * *

_To be continued_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was intending to have this out by my birthday last week, but there's something about the story that just felt so Christmassy and festive that I wanted to bring it out on Christmas Eve instead. So here it is! I really hope you enjoy this not-so-little story. I absolutely love ballet and Swan Lake has such a special place in my heart so this was a joy to write.

A sharp tug. A bright, assaulting light.

“Patrick, get up.”

“Mmrhn…”

“Seriously, Patrick, if you don’t get out of bed in the next minute, I’m going to march down to the theatre and tell them you’ve dropped out.”

While Patrick knows that would never happen, even the very thought of it still stings him. It horrifies him to his core.

He springs out of bed, taking the thin blanket with him, and even if he does land on the floor then at least Rachel has got her wish.

“You _wouldn’t_ ,” he says, trying for a menacing tone that comes out incredibly sulky instead.

Rachel maintains her hard stare for a moment longer, fists balled on her hips, before she looks at Patrick for a moment more and breaks. Her face softens with pity and guilt.

“You’re right, I wouldn’t,” she says. “Just trying to make a funny. I wouldn’t do that to you if you’d stayed in bed for ten more years.” She gently pries the blanket out of Patrick’s hands and throws it into the washing basket at her feet.

“It’s no use,” Patrick says. “He still thinks you’re my wife.”

Rachel cocks her head. “You know if you just tell him that I’m not, then he’ll probably believe you, right?”

Patrick drags himself up and sits down properly on the edge of his little bed. He catches sight of himself in the small, grubby mirror on the opposite wall. He hasn’t shaved in two days and his hair is bearing the knotty detriment of a week tossing and turning in bed. He looks a mess.

“The problem with that, Rach, is that you are literally my wife.”

Rachel turns around and throws a cushion at him. It lands at his feet and he grabs onto it, hugging it to himself pathetically.

“Oh, stop with all that. I’m _technically_ your wife, and you know it.” Rachel kneels in front of him, one hand collecting up her apron so it doesn’t get dusty on their uncleaned wooden floor and the other placed gently on Patrick’s knee. “I’m no more your wife than you are my husband.”

“‘And you, Patrick, are not my husband,’” Patrick finishes, quoting Rachel’s unconventional wedding vows back to her. “Man, the officiant was so confused.”

After Patrick and Rachel’s quiet, rushed wedding in their hometown chapel that seemed to satisfy their grandparents, complete with a small gathering at Patrick’s house with fruit cake and cups of tea, they’d followed it up with another ceremony. Drunk out of their wits and laughing hysterically once they’d got to New York, with only a random woman Rachel had kissed the night before as witness. That was the one that felt like their proper wedding.

By the time they finish reminiscing, Rachel and Patrick are sat side-by-side at the foot of Patrick’s bed, catching their breath and wiping their eyes.

“Do you – do you think our parents knew what we were up to when we moved out here?” Rachel says between weak laughs.

“Oh, absolutely,” Patrick says. “I’ve never seen a more knowing look in my mother’s eye. Well, except when I’d home gushing about Brandy Williams in junior school. You remember him?”

“I remember his sister,” Rachel says wistfully. Then she shakes herself and stands up, holding out a hand for Patrick to stand up with her. “Come on, grumpy. No more moping. I’ll heat you some water for a bath, then we can go get some soup and hot gingerbread from Chinatown.”

“Okay, but you’re paying for mine.”

“Why?”

“You’re the one that got us into this! The whole mess is your fault.”

Rachel scoffs and bats Patrick’s hand away, sending him back to the floor. “Why?”

“You’re the one who introduced yourself as my wife to the concierge or whoever it was!”

“Ugh, you _know_ the agreement.”

Patrick sighs. It’s easy to be annoyed, but Rachel is right. He knows both of them almost gag on their words when they have to say ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, but it’s just easier. Financially, socially, and every other -ly in between.

They get ready and head into town, counting their budget to see how much they can treat themselves with. Patrick has always liked the way they look together, warm and humble in their winter coats, Rachel’s small hand resting comfortably in the crook of Patrick’s elbow as they look at street jugglers and Rachel toys the with handmade jewellery at the craft fairs that…well, hopefully next year they’ll be able to afford.

Sometimes, people they know will pass them and nod their heads politely. Sometimes, people they know in a very _different_ way will look them up and down and wink, a lot less politely. Content with their arrangement, Rachel and Patrick like the place they live. It’s comfortable, and it’s familiar. It’s not entirely _them_ , but no one else needs to know that. They only put the rings on when they’re out together anyway.

“Do you reckon there’ll be an opening at Macy’s any time soon?” Rachel says as they pass the formidable department store. She lets go of Patrick’s arm and stares up at the building, watching as the outside lights come on gradually. “It’s been a while since any of my friends have mentioned getting work in the haberdashery section. If I can show some of them my work, then I might –”

Rachel’s interrupted by the blinding flash of a camera bulb, shoved into Patrick’s face from the left. He flinches away and blinks rapidly.

“Patrick Brewer?” a man beside the cameraperson says. Patrick hears the tinny crescendo of the camera getting itself ready to shoot again, so he shields his eyes with a flat palm.

When the spots have stopped dancing in front of his eyes, he recognises the producer of the ballet from the auditions.

“Do you mind if we take a few photographs for the next edition? News has been catching on about your role. It’s been a devil to find you, I would never have guessed you lived around here –”

“Sir, these pictures are no good, I can tell already –”

Patrick frowns and pushes his hands out so they obscure the camera lens even more. “Sorry, I’m not – I’m not interested in taking any photographs. Uh, good day.”

Rachel shoots the producer a scathing look and drags Patrick away by the arm.

“Honestly, the nerve of it,” she mutters as they hurry away from the camera and the small crowd that had been gathering around to look at them. The thought of it, of being perceived like that, grips at Patrick’s throat like cold, wet fingers. “They ignore you and reject you for years, now all of a sudden you’re a regular Marie Taglioni.”

“Yeah, well we’ll see how long it all lasts,” Patrick says.

“What do you mean?”

“David still hasn’t gotten into contact.”

They reach the food booth, the hot steam of chicken bone broth billowing out into their faces. Rachel pulls out her coin purse and makes their orders.

“You know, it’s not all on him to talk,” Rachel says. “You’re the one that owes him an explanation.”

“I know, but…” Patrick sighs, making a movement that could be interpreted as a shiver against the cold but really just looks like he’s having a tantrum. “I don’t _want_ to.”

“Oh, you don’t want to?”

“No! This whole thing has just been overwhelming. And – and distressing. And I don’t know if I want it to go any further.”

“Aw, you’re in _distress?”_ Rachel pouts. “Don’t be a baby, Patrick. The opportunity you’ve always wanted is sitting in your hands. All you have to do is make things right.”

Rachel collects their cardboard bowls of soup and perches them tentatively on the tips of her upturned fingers like a waiter as they shift through the rest of the crowd towards the nearest park. Patrick knows he’s trailing behind, but it’s not all sulk. It’s not often he gets a day off work, especially not in the past few months, and he’s always enjoyed the way the New York streets look at their busiest. Wading through shallow puddles that have collected on the concrete, grubby pigeons and blackbirds flying overhead, the crackling and jostling noises of people and their vehicles; it’s not hard for Patrick to feel like he’s nestled right in between the bluish grey watercolor smudges on the postcards he likes to send his mother.

He feels at home here, whatever home means. He feels home when he limps back late from his secret practices and Rachel shoves his feet in an ice bath and a hot whiskey into his hand. He feels home when an automobile passes him on the street, spluttering and smoking, which makes him splutter and he’s stuck with the lingering scent of gasoline in his nose for the rest of the day. In a place like this, there are no homesteads, no farms on the hill. They’re pioneers of concrete and cold lunches, of sustenance, a place where humans haven’t spent long enough to be standing on roots. Rather, they _are_ the roots. Patrick and his neighbours and his co-workers. They’re the ones painting _home_ into the cracks of the pavement, so that one day someone may step foot into their new life and know it means home from the very first touch.

He’s sat down on the park bench thinking about all the other things he could start to call home if he wanted when Rachel nudges him gently.

“What’re you thinking about?”

Patrick shrugs. He doesn’t want to tell the truth, but he’s not about to lie, either.

“David,” he says. “And what I’m going to do about it all.”

“I think a simple explanation could go far, for a start,” Rachel says.

Patrick scoffs. Not at Rachel, but his own stupidity and carelessness.

“I can only hope it’s enough,” he says quietly. He’s spent the past few years swiping expensive theatre and dance magazines off the bottom of the newsie’s stands after the daily headlines have all been bought and the stands neglected. He knows all about David Rose, even if he only recently started putting the name and face to all the stories of scandal and rejection and slander that have rocked the theatre community for many a season now.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin, or how to convince him that I’m trustworthy enough to keep as a performer or a –” Patrick trails off. He’s not sure what else. He sighs, leaning back on the damp park bench and throwing his soup bowl into the nearby trashcan. “I can’t even begin to imagine how I’ve made him feel.”

“Well, how does he make you feel?” Rachel asks, simple as anything.

She says it placidly, as though there’s a quick, obvious answer to that question, and…well. Patrick’s not sure there’s enough air in his lungs to describe how David makes him feel. How David made him feel that first night he sat down in the theatre and watched him dance, even if Patrick hadn’t been entirely sure there was someone there. He had looked out to the audience for a moment and sworn he’d seen _something_ ; a glimmer of brocade, the rim of a hat. Though the figure had still been obscured in darkness, it was like…it was like the moon seeing a breath of light in the sky it had always dominated alone. The day he realised there was life out there, and it was seeing him dance. And it was _letting_ him dance.

“That’s just it. He makes me feel,” Patrick whispers. It’s only when a sharp gust of wind brings a colder brush to his cheek than he expected that he realises a tear has slipped down his cheek. “I don’t know what I’m talking about, Rachel. Of course I want to keep going with this. Of _course_ I want to smooth things over with him.”

Rachel reaches out with a mittened hand and places it firmly on his shoulder. It’s grounding. That’s the one thing Patrick always appreciates about Rachel. She doesn’t dance around him. He smiles at her, and she rests her head on his shoulder.

“Friday at six o’clock, you’d better be in that theatre,” she says. “Rehearsals have already been delayed enough without you two brooding around.”

Patrick says nothing, but she knows that he agrees.

“Snow’s coming down,” he says quietly, after a pause.

They look up. The sky is being cloaked in thicker and thicker blacks by the second, the few stars visible being punctured out here and there as the brand new lights of the city take their place. The snow is at that inscrutable height where Patrick only thinks he can see it coming down because of the drop in temperature, but then he tunes in to the golden blinking around his eyes and realises that he can see the drifting of large, clumpy snowflakes obscuring the streetlights in tiny increments.

Neither of them mind the cold. George, Artie and Herb will laugh at them sometimes when they come into the bar late at night, stamping snow from their feet, shouting “Look, the Canucks have walked a hundred miles to get here!” But they like the bite of it. They like how it’s the same bite it always was after long days of snowball fights and kickball on snow day when school was closed.

They sit and watch the snow drift gently for a while until an older woman, perched on a chariot and trotting through the park, spots them. She signals the driver to stop and bustles out in her thick overcoat and huge hat, clucking at them.

“Ah, newlyweds! I’ve not seen you kids around here before. How old are you?”

“Uh, I’m thir –” Rachel kicks Patrick’s foot – “teen.”

The woman frowns.

“Thir…no, I’m not thirteen. Nineteen?”

Rachel eyes the woman’s purse and nods fervently. “Yep, we’re nineteen. Just moved here last week!”

“Bless your little hearts.” The woman opens her purse and takes out a bundle of notes and coins. “Everyone knows it’s good luck to give money to newlyweds. I wish you all the best!”

And then she’s gone.

“What did I tell you? It _is_ a thing that happens. There are benefits to being babyfaces. Old ladies used to give my sisters money all the time.”

“Holy shit, there’s five dollars here,” Patrick says, unwrapping the bundle of notes and pouring the coins into his other hand.

Rachel shrieks. “Oh my _God.”_ They stand up, looking at the collection of notes giddily. “You have a choice, Brewer. Summer shoes or another leotard?”

Patrick thinks on it for a moment, then picks up a quarter and smiles.

“Gingerbread, I think.”

* * *

The closer Patrick gets to Friday, the more he dreads his inevitable run-in with David. He knows, logically, that if he never turns up to the theatre again then he’ll lose his role or the performance might never go ahead, but the stupid irrational part of his brain that’s been sulking on the floor since last week seems to think that it’s a good idea.

It’s the shortest day of the year, and the darkness outside has Patrick on edge. He’s used to sneaking into the back of the theatre when it’s still light and the concrete beneath his thinly shoed feet is warm and calming. He’s used to the gentle lapping of the docks and the squawking of crows overhead, not this frosted nightmare. He and Rachel always seem to make ends meet in the wintertime, but money has been tight this year and Patrick’s worried they won’t have enough to see them through a warm Christmas Day. Ironically, their next delivery of coal comes on the 26th.

He’s aching from his shift at work, but it’s the good kind of sting in his muscles that he usually likes to shake off with a dance. By this point on a Friday evening, he’s usually having a few final gulps of tea and doing his stretches. But he’s gripping the edge of his bed and staring at the wall, thinking and thinking about how everything might go wrong.

What if David doesn’t listen? What if he’s made up his mind, cast someone else, closed the theatre?

“You’ll not know any of that if you don’t go in the next five minutes.”

A rucksack falls onto the bed on the other side of the room with a soft thump. Rachel, back from the workshop and rubbing her eyes that have no doubt been assaulted by ten hours of sewing by candlelight, turns to face him.

“I said all that out loud, didn’t I?”

“Only for the fifth time this week. Now go, I won’t hear any more of it until you’re back.”

She clasps him firmly on the shoulder as he picks up his bag and leaves. It’s just what he needs, and when he steps outside their apartment and grits his teeth against the cold that’s getting stronger with every downwards step he’s filled with a warmth and surety that sustains him all the way there.

It’s such a familiar routine, this one. This once-sneaky trip to the Opera Rouge. He can feel every twist and turn in the street the same way he’s seen David walk up and down Irving and Washington Street and all the other places Patrick could barely afford to step foot in. David had once told Patrick, offhandedly, that he liked to imagine great romantic tales playing out on these streets. Friends who evaded one another’s love for years, rival bookstore owners, star-crossed lovers that meet on the train. Patrick thought it was the most adorable thing he’d ever heard.

As usual at this time, the door is open. Patrick steps inside, feeling like he’s going slower and faster than usual as he heads for the wings.

There’s a single candle lit on the bracket in the corner. The same one that had illuminated the soft yet sharp angles of David’s face, where Patrick’s palms had fit so well he could have sworn they were always meant to.

The moon is a thin sliver tonight, so the curtain over the natural spotlight window is drawn. And the curtain is up.

Someone is here, and it’s not the orchestra.

Giddiness and fear bubble up in Patrick’s stomach, the strange concoction forcing him back from the edge of the stage. He listens to the orchestra seat themselves for their practice and can see the top of Jocelyn Schitt’s ridiculously styled hair from where he stands. They’re all talking excitedly about the new scorebooks for Swan Lake and someone is scolding someone else for thumbing through it carelessly.

“Right!” Jocelyn claps her hands together. “Did you all decide which you thought was the easiest out of what we learned this morning?”

There’s a staggered chorus that, put together, sounds something like “the pas de deux”.

“Act two or three?”

“Two,” the orchestra say in unison.

Something’s making Patrick feel like he’s not going to get a chance to dance peacefully by himself today, and he’s just about to leave when he spots someone in the back of the stalls. They’re no more than a grey silhouette in the dark, but Patrick would recognise the shape of that hair even if it were stood in front of the night sky it so resembles.

David’s sat there, biting his nails, his feet drawn up onto the seat and his knees bent to the left. He meets Patrick’s eye and stops biting.

There’s a vague breath of a greeting caught in the back of Patrick’s throat, but he can’t get it out. It’s only been a week since he saw David, but watching him stand up and approach the stage claws at something deep and unexplored in Patrick that’s neither good nor bad. It’s what’s been burning in the pit of his stomach ever since he and David took that first aimless walk along the docks, where Patrick had run his hand along the metal railing just to see if he could still feel the cold.

David looks underdressed beneath his coat, as though he’s wearing a –

“Leotard?” Patrick says against his will.

David looks surprised for a moment, as though Patrick had picked a completely random word and said it. Then he looks down, gesturing at himself.

“Oh. Oh,” he says, laughing nervously. It sounds a little forced, as though he’s trying to inject casual into something that is anything but. “I just – yeah. Had this since I was eighteen. My mother had this dance instructor who I ended up dating, and after that lessons just got a little complicated so I haven’t really danced since, but –”

David cuts himself off. Apparently, he has no idea how fond Patrick’s face has become, how his chest is bursting just from hearing his voice.

“It’s okay,” Patrick says quietly. “I get it.”

They look at each other for a moment. Patrick watches a million sentences die on David’s tongue, hidden behind tightly clamped lips. He decides to bite the bullet.

“David, I am so sorry. I should’ve gone after you, I should’ve explained –”

“No, I’m sorry for running off –”

“Rachel’s _not_ my wife,” Patrick insists.

There’s a space between them that Patrick desperately wants to close. He steps forward until he and David are close together on the right stage wall. Patrick takes David’s hands. They’re warm. He wonders how long David has been inside waiting.

David frowns. “Then…then why…?”

“It’s a – God, this sounds so stupid when I try and explain it,” Patrick says. “Rachel and I have been friends since we were kids. Everyone in our town always expected us to end up married, but we got to about sixteen years old and realised that marriage doesn’t really…accommodate either of us.”

David nods almost immediately, understanding. His face has softened, his guard down.

Patrick swallows. The click of his throat is loud in the quiet room, like the gentle tap of a shoe on a cavernous stage. “Anyway, we both knew we wanted to move here for different things, so we got married to find cheaper living arrangements and – well, it’s kind of immoral, but…people like giving newlyweds money. We got a bit from our friends and grandparents before we left.”

David’s shaking his head, and Patrick worries for a minute before he realises it’s the slow, smiling shake that someone does out of fondness. “Terrible.”

“I know,” Patrick laughs, and draws closer on instinct. David doesn’t stop him. His breath hitches, and suddenly their foreheads are pressed together. Patrick is acutely aware of the caffè mocha and sweet pastry on David’s breath, and is glad he treated himself today.

“I should have let you explain,” David whispers. “Running, it was – it’s natural, it’s like a defence. I’ve been through too much in this room, I can’t take any more.”

Patrick presses himself closer, finding soon after that it’s not possible. “David, I _promise…”_

“I shouldn’t have assumed you’d be like everyone else, Patrick, you’re –”

“I don’t want to be away from you –”

“I think we both need to shut up now,” David breathes, and they do. Patrick cups his face and kisses him softly, astounded at how something can feel so novel and so familiar at the same time. David brings his arms around Patrick’s shoulders, firm and sure.

They kiss until David’s hand is rubbing up and down between Patrick’s shoulder blades and the cold from outside finally dispels and Patrick feels tears spring to his closed eyes, so wrapped in the rightness of it all that it threatens to knock him over.

But what breaks him out of the spell isn’t what he’s expecting.

“Um…David, if you’re okay for us to start…we’d really like to get going with our practice?”

Mortified, David and Patrick break away to find Jocelyn staring up at them, her teeth gritted in what Patrick is hoping is an apologetic grimace.

David nods, and Patrick can tell he’s just as embarrassed. But there’s something else there that looks like giddiness, like he’s just rewritten something in a place that he only ever associated with hurt. “Mm, mm-hm. Yup. Go ahead.”

As Jocelyn starts talking again to the now-chattering orchestra, Patrick drops his chin onto David’s shoulder and laughs silently. David is laughing too, his hands holding Patrick’s waist firmly, before he draws him into a hug. Patrick turns his head to the left and breathes David in before pressing a gentle kiss to his neck, a soft spot just below his ear.

“I’m really, really glad you’re here,” David says, and Patrick has never heard him say anything with more certainty.

Patrick pulls away. “Can I ask why you’re wearing a leotard? You explained it, but you didn’t answer it.”

“Oh.” David smirks. “Well. I can’t dance very well, but when you grow up with Moira Rose for a mother you’re inevitably forced into enough lessons to learn the principles. This…isn’t the first time I’ve been here since…you know. I’ve been a couple of times. Just…I don’t know. Waiting.”

Patrick’s heart almost chokes. “You’ve been coming here waiting for me to show up.”

“And practicing!” David adds defensively, an unruly hand flapping through the air as though to wave away the ridiculous notion that he might have been wanting Patrick to walk in on him dancing for once instead of the other way around.

Patrick nods. “Okay, David.”

The orchestra start to tune up. Patrick looks down and laces his fingers through David’s.

“They said they were going to do a pas de deux,” Patrick says in a low voice. It’s got frequencies of hope that he’s willing David to pick up on.

_The first three woodwind notes_.

“Did they, now?” David says, as though he wasn’t sat there when they said it.

_The trill of a harp._

“I don’t think I know it,” Patrick says. It’s a lie. He _knows_ he doesn’t know it.

“Just…let yourself not know it.”

They shed their outer coats and step further into the stage in tandem. Patrick can feel his muscles tauten, the familiar poses he learned long ago and taught himself to perfect circling back into his body and nerves like clockwork.

“Do _you_ know it?”

David clicks his tongue. “I’ve seen _Swan Lake_ almost every time I’ve been to Europe,” he says.

Patrick wants to tease him for being a dork about ballet, but he realises firstly that he can’t exactly talk and that there’s something else he’s hearing in David’s words. David, the perfectionist, the one who probably knows every modern Western ballet step for step, is sacrificing the accuracy of this dance to let Patrick explore it. He’s doing them both a favour, in a way.

Patrick’s never danced like this with someone before. He didn’t realise how good it could feel to have the support at your back, your hands, lifting you and being safe in the knowledge that they’ll always put you down on two feet.

Patrick can see the strain that letting go of the dance’s proper steps is having on David. He can feel his own fear of messing up rising in him, too. But the music is there to guide them, and with wordless smiles and firm hands they improvise their way through something that makes Patrick feel more beautiful and powerful than he ever has in his entire life. David’s so graceful, his arms much stronger than Patrick was expecting, and his form is unparalleled. He’s not sure how he’s able to concentrate on his own movement with David _right there._

“It’s because you’re brilliant,” David says breathlessly as the pas de deux ends. Patrick grins sheepishly.

“Did I say that out loud?”

“Shouted it across the room,” David murmurs, rubbing his nose against Patrick’s before leaning in for another kiss.

Either Jocelyn and the orchestra have really stopped noticing them or they’re doing a good job of pretending they aren’t. It must be awkward for them if they _can_ hear, but Patrick doesn’t care. Because he’s on this stage again, and David is here, and he and Rachel have five dollars to get them through the winter and everything is going to be fine.

David leads Patrick away from the stage as the orchestra discuss the piece and plan which one they’re going to rehearse next. They pull on their shoes and coats, holding onto each other’s shoulders for balance.

“Have you ever tried a Rob Roy?” David says out of the blue.

Patrick vaguely remembers the name from the theatre magazines he…borrowed.

“The opera?”

David clicks his tongue. “No, the drink. They named one after it when the opera came out last year.”

“I haven’t, no –”

“And technically, _Rob Roy_ is an operetta, which means –”

“David, are you trying to ask me on a date?”

David is still flapping his hands, the blush rising in his cheeks as he fumbles his way through the differences between an opera and an operetta.

“Mm…I – yup. Yes, that is, in essence, what I’m asking.”

Patrick smiles, relishing in the warmth of the candle near his cheek and David’s hands, which have come to rest gently over Patrick’s.

“In that case, I’d love to.”

* * *

Patrick had never heard of a Rob Roy. He hadn’t heard of a great deal of things, he realises, as he and David get themselves situated in David’s favourite bar, the Elmdale Gentleman’s Club. He’s shot through with a little spike of hesitance when he and David enter arm-in-arm, but Patrick looks around to see men whispering into each other’s ears and holding hands and relaxes. He’s been in clubs like this before, but never so expensive.

They take their seats at the end of the bar after ordering. David nudges Patrick’s cocktail towards him and they clink them. The Rob Roy is smooth and smoky; the sweet vermouth takes just enough edge off of the whiskey, which tastes more expensive than all his belongings put together, that he doesn’t cough as he polishes off half the draught in one mouthful.

“My God,” Patrick says, and only spares a second to smile before he finishes the rest of it. “I didn’t think alcohol could taste like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know, _good._ I thought it was just a cheap means to an end.”

Patrick has stumbled out of his friend’s garden sheds after downing their parent’s rum bottles and been sent to bed without supper. He’s bought hot mulled wine only to pour it on his hands because he wore holes into his winter gloves, and his very first New York winter would’ve threatened to bite them off otherwise. David orders him another drink, and Patrick realises that never has he sat and enjoyed alcohol as a form of art before; something to be critiqued, actually thought about.

“Penny for your thoughts?” David says, nudging a knee to Patrick’s.

Patrick shrugs. “I’m just thinking that we’re very different people, is all.”

David makes a face like that’s obvious. “What’s new?”

Patrick rolls his eyes at him, accepting his second drink from the bartender. “Nothing new, I’m just thinking about it. And how…you know, if I was in a position like yours, I wouldn’t have needed to marry Rachel to come to the city. I could have just come here and been myself, and…”

“Don’t think like that,” David says firmly. “You’re here now. You’re here, and you’re where you’re meant to be.”

Patrick looks around the club, the club filled with his people, comforted by the sight of them and the familiar burn in his legs he always got after dancing. He smiles at David, taking his hand and lacing their fingers together.

After a few more drinks and about a half-hour of gentle nothings traded between them, the pianist in the corner of the room playing quiet Christmas carols, David leans in and says, “So, Patrick. Tell me what I’ve been dying to know ever since I met you.”

Patrick raises an eyebrow. “That question could go one of many ways.”

David tuts and rolls his eyes. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I want to know how as talented a dancer as you ended up self-taught and working at the docks.”

It should be a patronising question, and Patrick supposes it would be out of the mouth of anyone else, but it isn’t. It feels natural; it feels right to be telling David about himself, bridging the gap between what feels like many lives.

“I was raised in a small community in northern Ontario,” Patrick begins. “It was barely incorporated at the time I was born. My father grew up in Toronto and moved after getting his degree in medicine, then ended up becoming the town’s doctor. There’s where he met my mom, who taught at the school before she married – sorry, this is going on too long already. I’m probably boring you.”

But Patrick knows that’s a lie. David’s staring at him like he’s reciting _The Iliad_ from memory. In the original Greek, at that. So he clears his throat, and continues.

“A-anyway, Dad’s job meant we lived comfortably for a while. We had a good house, and I had a private tutor alongside my schooling. I also took dance lessons until I was ten, which is where I picked up the basics.”

It’s at this point of the story where Patrick’s mind always runs cold. Not with forgetfulness, but with the cold of those next few winters, the cold bitterness of the lime tea his mother would brew to stave off the coughing brought on by the coal that would rain down in horrid black plumes.

“Then, just as things were starting to look up for everyone else as well, there was a mining accident in the town. A lot of children lost their fathers, widows lost their incomes. We all had to start pitching in to help each other, and my dad didn’t waste a moment giving up as much as he could to bring aid to everyone else as well as Ma and me.”

“He sounds like a wonderful man,” David says earnestly.

“He is,” Patrick says, and he’s not sure he’s ever meant anything more in his whole life. He could never quite bring himself to tell his mother face-to-face the real reason why he and Rachel wanted to get away to New York, and even if she hadn’t worked it out he’s sure his father will have told her by now. Patrick doesn’t think he’s going to forget how he felt that day, seventeen and terrified. All but whispering in his father’s ear in his study late at night the truth that had been burning him up for months. Clint had clapped him on the arm the same way he did when Patrick won a hockey match, and told him that he was proud.

 _Be patient with the world, son,_ he’d said, and Patrick had almost cried with relief. _It’ll favor you good one day, I promise._

And he supposes that’s where he is now, in this club where he can love out loud. In favor with the world.

Patrick leans in closer to David as he tells the rest of the story, about him and his best friend Rachel coming out to each other and deciding to move to New York the way they did. He tells him about Rachel’s seamstressing, about the leotards she makes Patrick, and David’s eyebrow quirks surreptitiously as though he’s storing the information away for some further use. He tells him about the job at the docks that he dares not hope he might be giving up soon. He doesn’t say it aloud, in case he jinxes it or something horrible happens again that means the show won’t be going ahead, but he can’t pretend to be ignorant of the implications of performing in a show as big as this.

Fortunately, David seems to hear everything he doesn’t say. The bartender rings the bell for last orders and they grab their coats, relishing the last moments in which they can hold hands before walking outside.

Miraculously, as though New York has finally gone to sleep for once, there’s barely anyone outside. They take hold of each other’s hands again.

“I think you’ve been brave,” David says, the silhouette of his beautiful face glowing gently at the edges in the streetlights overhead. The cold steam that puffs from his mouth as he speaks is tinged gold too, like he’s a dragon breathing fire.

“I just do what I have to do to survive,” Patrick says, and David squeezes his hand at that. It feels like a promise. “So, uh, what about you?” he adds, as though he hasn’t spent the past couple of weeks scouring all his old newspaper copies for any morsel of information about David and read them over until the candles burned out.

David flaps the hand that Patrick’s not holding out at the night sky, his chin tilted back in nonchalance. “I’m pretty sure I wear all you need to know about me in the form of my many ridiculous coats, as my mother likes to say. But really, there isn’t much to know, in my opinion. Only that I was born into a career that lets me wear said ridiculous coats, but means I’ll probably be washed up by the time I’m fifty.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think I knew anyone older than fifty in my hometown. It’s a milestone.”

“Surprisingly, that doesn’t make me feel a _great_ deal better, but I appreciate the effort.”

“And I don’t think your coats are ridiculous.”

They really aren’t. Patrick doesn’t think he’s seen such lovely coats in all his life. This one in particular is appliqued with red roses and deep green thorns that twine daintily along the seams of the sleeves and down the centre of the back, and it fits so perfectly that it looks as though it was sewn up with David already inside it. What with some of the ridiculous requests Rachel has told Patrick about ever since she started getting wealthier clients, Patrick wouldn’t dismiss the possibility.

They walk in companiable silence for a while, and Patrick almost gets so lost in the calming dark, bright, dark, bright of walking under the measured line of streetlights that he almost forgets himself.

“David, where on earth are you taking me?” Patrick says, his mind drifting to clubs much more expensive and less…civilised than Elmdale. He wouldn’t mind it if David was there, but after the emotional roundabout that the night has been he’s really not in the mood for it.

To his surprise, David ducks his head, a faint blush fighting its way onto his cheeks against the cold. “I thought you might like to come home with me,” he says. “Not – not for that!” he adds quickly, though Patrick wasn’t going to shut down any possibility. “We’ve drank quite a bit tonight, and I was just going to make us some tea.”

Patrick’s whole chest opens with a well of something he never really associated with this new life he’s found himself embroiled in: safety and warmth.

“Tea sounds lovely,” he says quietly.

After spending the past three years drinking from the same tin cups, Patrick has to admit that the pot David makes for him is quite possibly the best tea he’s ever had. In between his gawking looks at the high, embellished ceiling and the ornate fireplace, Patrick can’t help but groan in satisfaction at the strong, sweet brew.

“I must say, I don’t think I’ve ever had tea like this,” Patrick says. “My mom used to make this godawful lime stuff to keep our throats clean of soot, and in winter we’d have brandy cocoa –”

“Ah! Partaking in a wee nightcap without me, are we, David?”

David’s face drops into a mask of annoyance that Patrick has to stop himself from laughing at with a sip of tea. He turns around to see Moira Rose, still dressed for whatever evening event called for a black and plum pinstriped crinoline dress, the yellow mountain of a wig balanced precariously on her head reminding Patrick of Jocelyn the conductor’s natural hair.

She raises an eyebrow when she catches sight of Patrick in what he presumes is her chair by the fireplace.

“I hope I’m not interrupting a dramatic reconciliation, Peregrin,” Moira says, clearly having been privy to every detail of his and David’s misunderstanding.

“Um…no, not at all,” he says, made nervous by the slightly intimidating shadow of Moira in the doorway. She approaches the two of them and plucks her own china cup off the set and pours out a tea.

 _“Patrick_ and I are doing just fine on our own, Mother,” David says in a sweetly irritated tone.

“In that case, I’m glad! I shan’t keep you any longer,” Moira concludes, as though she were the one who had called them there. “Pat…rick, do let me persuade you to complete your discipline and finesse for your artform under my experienced wing. You know, I once stood in your disproportionately tiny shoes.”

“Please don’t start,” David mutters.

“The year was 18…”

“…79. Mm-hm.”

“I was but seventeen.”

“Mother, _I_ was seventeen in 1879.”

Moira ignores him. “Hostessing at a charming backwater saloon, when the great pedagogue Marius Petipa came in for a Reuben. That’s a sandwich –”

“Okay, I think we’ve heard enough, thanks so much,” David interrupts, shooing Moira away from the table. Moira clicks her tongue at David, but doesn’t try to protest. She takes a noisy sip of tea as he glides away from the table, turning back around at the last moment and fixing Patrick with a significant look.

“For what it’s worth, dear, I am glad to see you hereabouts again,” she says, and somehow Patrick knows she’s talking about David’s life rather than the house or the show. “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

Patrick meets David’s eye, quite unable to find the words for how that made him feel. He has _purpose,_ here with these people. They get him. They value him.

They _see_ him.

Once Moira has gone up to her room with her tea, Patrick looks at the clock. It’s well past one o’clock, and though he knows Rachel won’t be worrying he does have a lunchtime start at work in the morning.

“I should be going,” he says, the regret of leaving behind the warm seat and David’s hand atop his already seeping in.

David looks at the clock too. “Oh – Oh my God. I’m sorry. I didn’t realise what time it was.”

“It flies, huh,” Patrick says, chuckling as he rises from his seat. David sees him to the door, cracking it open slightly so that Patrick is stuck in a little purgatory between what feels like the before and after.

“I’ll see you…Tuesday? First rehearsal?”

“Christmas Eve morning,” David confirms. “See you then.”

He leans in, cupping the back of Patrick’s head to give him a kiss that burns. Patrick presses himself closer, letting a soft slip of tongue in between David’s parted lips and snaking his arms around his waist.

He’s not sure how long they stay there, but either the clock strikes half one or the cold gets too much or both and Patrick’s back out into the night, feeling like there’s a safety net behind him all the way home.

Already by the time he leaves for work the next morning, there’s a slip of paper on the floor just outside his front door. It’s tented where it was clearly hastily folded then sprung open again once it came through the letterbox. He opens it up and reads:

_A Cordial Invitation To:_

_Jonathan Rose’s Annual Yuletide Gathering_

_The Rose Residence, 69 th Street_

_24 th December, 20:00pm start_

Then, scrawled at the bottom, in less fine handwriting:

_P.S. Bring Rachel._

* * *

For the sixth time that hour, Rachel stomps through the length of their tiny apartment as though she’s headed for a destination much further away than their narrow walls allow.

“You’re gonna put your head through that wall if you go any faster,” Patrick says, trying to block Rachel’s path.

She stops, sighing irritably as she worries the mass of fabric in her arms into a tight bundle. “I just – ugh, I’ve been planning on wearing this for _ages,_ and the Christmas party seemed like the perfect time, but everyone’s going to hate it!”

“They’re not going to hate it, Rach,” Patrick says. “What on earth makes you think that?”

“D’you know how many I sold this week? One. There’s me thinking it’s going to be the dress of the season, and I sell one for _three dollars.”_

Patrick puts a hand on Rachel’s arm, gently taking the dress from her and smoothing it out. Personally, he thinks it’s beautiful. It’s done in a wide plaid design, the contrasting shades of wine and pine separated by festive gold embroidering.

“If it makes you feel any better, you’ll be unique,” he says. “And what with everyone who’s going to be there tonight, you might just get all the right sorts of people asking about it.”

That seems to unfurrow Rachel’s brow a bit. She shrugs, apparently conceding, and undoes the buttons down the back of the dress to slip it over her petticoat. Patrick looks out at the window as he tugs on his own black sleeves and necktie. He can hear the crunch of hardened slush on the edges of the pavement as people and carriages head to their own Christmas parties, and the first few drunks being kicked out of the bars. He’s never spent Christmas Eve actually doing something, something that feels important, and it sets off a wave of giddiness through him that he’d barely been able to tamp down during their rehearsal earlier that day.

It had been a fairly standard rehearsal, just a customary getting-to-know of each role and some basic aptitude tests. Patrick had tried to concentrate, but it had been difficult when the fellow party invitees among the cast were talking about crab cakes and Merlot and plum puddings and not what, but _who_ they were wearing tonight, as though that meant anything. It made Patrick a little self conscious to think about his one black suit gathering dust in the cupboard, the one he’d worn to his graduation and his grandfather’s funeral and his own wedding.

Rachel gets herself ready fairly quickly, throwing her hair into a simple braided chignon, and they head out. Patrick’s glad he’s been here before, otherwise he might have sworn as loudly as Rachel does when they approach the open door, the warmth of fifty people and the swell of string music already billowing out.

They’re ushered in by a butler that Patrick is embarrassed to realise is dressed not too dissimilarly to him. Rachel squeezes his elbow reassuringly, but Patrick’s consciousness is only dispelled completely when he catches sight of the way David is looking at him from across the foyer.

The distance closes between them and suddenly Patrick is at his side, ghosting a fingertip over the elaborate gold and silver embroidery that runs up and down the sleeve of David’s coat. There are birds sewn together, flying across the planes of his shoulders, and words so small that Patrick can’t read them unless he’s willing to get closer than he’d dare in public.

“You look…you look –”

“Like the staff?” Patrick jokes, and David immediately scolds him for it.

“No! Not at all.” He looks Patrick over, and Patrick can’t pretend he doesn’t know what David’s seeing. It’s been a few years since he last had use for the suit, and a good couple of season’s work at the docks have made him considerably stockier than when he arrived. His shoulders have filled out the top half nicely without looking ridiculous, and he feels comfortable. Maybe he doesn’t look so bad after all.

“He’s acting like I would let him leave the house without anything on that looked incorrect,” Rachel chimes in, and David turns to her with a gleam in his eyes.

“You must be Rachel! You made Patrick’s leotards, didn’t you?”

Rachel nods, clearly proud. “Between you and me, I’m pretty sure he would have practiced in a potato sack and his work boots if I hadn’t stopped him.”

David looks delighted. “I like her,” he says to Patrick, surprised. He turns to Rachel. “I like you.”

“Well, I’m glad _someone_ appreciates m–”

“David, I couldn’t find any glasses so I brought the bowl. Do you want a spoon or a straw –”

Rachel falters as someone appears at David’s shoulder, a small bowl of punch in her hands. Twyla smiles at Patrick in greeting, but then is cut off too by the sight of Rachel.

They look the double of each other, both startled and wide-eyed with their red hair pulled neatly back.

And they’re wearing the same dress. Rachel’s dress.

“It was...it – _you_ bought it?”

Twyla looks confused, handing the bowl of punch to David without taking her eyes off Rachel. “What do you mean – you made this dress?”

“You bought that from McArthur’s, didn’t you? If so, then…yes. I made it.”

Twyla smiles widely. “Oh my, I had no idea! It’s _beautiful!_ And – and you look lovely in it, too. I was going to visit my great aunt down that street and I saw it in the window, and –”

“– I didn’t put many of them in the store, I didn’t think anyone wanted them –”

“– Goodness, no, you should be proud! Come on, there was a woman from the press earlier asking me where my dress was from. You can come and tell her yourself.”

Blushing hard, Rachel takes Twyla’s outstretched arm and they start to circle the room. Twyla proudly tells all the socialites and journalists they pass who made it, squeezing Rachel’s elbow every time someone asks her to deliver them the same one for Christmas Day or if she can make them a bespoke dress in the new year.

“Looks like we have our costume designer for the show,” David says shrewdly, coming close to Patrick again and handing him a glass of champagne.

“Wait, really?”

David shrugs. “Job’s there if she wants it.”

Patrick fills up with a giddiness that he tries to hide in a room of so many people. It’s difficult when everything seems to be looking up all at once. “She’s going to be thrilled.”

David smiles; it’s a quiet, safe thing, just for Patrick. David gently knocks the tip of Patrck’s nose with his index knuckle and Patrick keens out of the way playfully.

“Shall we dance?” he says as the music swells up into something livelier.

Patrick checks in with himself, thinks about the morning’s rehearsal, and takes a moment to feel the burn in his calves before he gives a response.

“God, no.”

The rest of the night passes in something that feels both like a hazy blur and an unforgettable spectacle. Patrick calmly answers any questions that come his way about the ballet, and it jars him slightly to think that there’ll be a piece on _him_ in the magazines he’s been reading wistfully for years. Every time he meets up with Rachel, she’s completely flustered by questions about her business and her arms are overflowing with reminders to make a dress for this and some stockings for that. He feels like he’s spinning round in some kind of enchanted garden, disoriented in all the best ways by the heady whirl of cinnamon and mulled wine and canapes and the harsh, thick pine scent of the Rose’s beautiful Christmas tree.

As the guests are getting steadily further out of their wits and the organised dancing has devolved into Alexis and Stevie drunkenly leading some absurd German routine with a lot of high kicks and bad singing, Patrick decides to put down his glasses of wine and observe from afar. His head is buzzing almost as much as some of the people he can see staggering around, but he’s lucid enough to realise that the guests are trickling out. He needs to find Rachel, but she and Twyla disappeared long ago.

He finds David, perched near the bottom of the staircase, his chin resting on the bannister. The glass in his hand has been empty for some time, if the sober look in his eyes is any indicator.

“Hi,” Patrick says softly, breaking David out of his reverie.

“Hi,” he repeats, looking up with a smile. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh, is that so?” Patrick says, sitting down beside him. He rests a hand on the inside of David’s right leg. “Seems like you were looking really hard sat here on the staircase.”

David swats him away. “Um, I _was_ looking. Before. Because, um, I have something for you.”

“Oh, you do?”

“Mm-hm.” David scrambles up and goes quicker up the stairs than Patrick expected him to. Clearly not all sober, then.

He follows David up and marvels at the long hallway on the way down, adorned in festive garlands and candles nestled in wreaths of holly on the small circular tables every few paces. Eventually, David stops and turns left and Patrick follows him into what must be his room. His anticipation piques a little as the door closes behind them, but Patrick is immediately calmed by the gentle blowing of the translucent satin curtains against the open balcony doors and the weak crackling of the neglected fireplace.

David rustles around in a bag at the end of his bed and pulls out something wrapped in white paper and tied with a black bow.

“What –”

“I got you something,” David blurts out. He’s nervous, fidgeting with the bow so much it almost looks like he’s about to open the thing. “It’s not much, but I…anyway. Here.”

He hands Patrick the gift, heavy and rectangular. Patrick loosens the bow.

“It really isn’t much,” David says again, and Patrick’s heart clenches at the worry in his small voice. The wrapping falls open and Patrick lets out a soft gasp at the item in his hands.

It’s a book, and a very old one at that. The cover is worn and flaky, yet when he sticks the pad of his forefinger onto the edge of the cover and pries it open as gently as he can the stiffness of it betrays its unuse. It’s a first edition of something, but must have been sat in the store or someone’s bookshelf for ages.

“Le Histoire de…something,” Patrick says, peering at the last word which has rubbed off with age. “Charles Sorel.”

“He wrote about performance and mathematics,” David explains. “The logic behind art and the art behind logic. I thought you might like it – but if you don’t, of course, I can just take it back and –”

Patrick manages to cut him off with a look.

“I _love_ it,” he says firmly, stepping forward. David’s shoulders relax dramatically as he huffs out a breath. “David, it’s beautiful. Thank you.”

David shrugs and waves a hand, the picture of nonchalance, as though he hadn’t just been chewing himself to pieces over the present. “You’re welcome anytime. I’m a very…generous person, it’s no big deal.”

Patrick laughs. Carefully, he puts the book aside on David’s coffee table and closes the distance between them, kissing David gently. He winds a hand through David’s hair, and if the soft moan that escapes David’s lips is a whine of protest then he definitely doesn’t give any further indication of his displeasure so Patrick doesn’t stop to check.

They kiss for what feels hours, shedding clothes in a gradual and gentle manner that doesn’t scare Patrick nearly as much as it had when he’d thought about it before. When they’re in nothing more than their underclothes, Patrick walks David backwards and closer to his four poster bed, a beautiful dark mahogany set with a Merlot-colored quilt and monochrome pillows. The closer Patrick gets, he can see that there are roses carved into the posts.

“Patrick, are you sure?” David breathes into his mouth once his back is on the bed, Patrick’s warm weight on top of him, the thin, soft fabric of his long johns doing precious little to conceal anything.

“Completely sure,” Patrick whispers, and then it’s as easy as dancing. There’s something about David that feels like a reunion with someone he’s never met; something so achingly, beautifully familiar yet so new that it still sets off the spark of novelty like fireworks every time. Like he was always meant to be here, always meant to kiss David there and there and there, always meant to know him like this. Like every time was meant to feel like the first, except the first.

The cool of the night air from the open window and the heat from the fire is a perfect mix on Patrick’s skin afterwards, when he feels like he needs both heating up and cooling down. He’s never been a fan of tepid heat, the kind that sits stickily in the middle and doesn’t seem to go anywhere. His favorite weathers have always been blinding, scorching sun and bitterly freezing cold.

After a while of lying in David’s arms, letting his breathing come back to normal, Patrick’s ears tune into the whistle and bang of fireworks outside. He grabs his underclothes and puts them back on while David grabs the quilt and wraps it round his body. They head out onto the balcony, where the sky is alight with reds, blues and greens, huge cyclical things that boom and burst for what looks like miles. It’s punctuated by the faint cheering of those less sleepy on the streets below.

David wraps an arm around Patrick, pulling him into the blanket.

“Merry Christmas, Patrick,” he murmurs into Patrick’s hair.

Patrick smiles wider than he thinks he ever has in his entire life.

“Merry Christmas, David.”

And as the firework display goes on and on, there’s something insistent and hopeful in Patrick’s heart that’s swelling up, shouting _yes. This. It starts now._

* * *

When Patrick had tentatively approached David in the new year and asked if he was going to be paid during rehearsals as well as after the show, David had made a noise that could only be described as affronted and said, “does a builder get paid while they’re building the foundations of a house?” With that, Patrick had promptly quit his long, tiring job at the docks and started spending a lot more time at rehearsals, avoiding journalists on the street or tangled up in David’s bed.

And when he’s not at rehearsals, avoiding journalists on the street or tangled up in David’s bed, Patrick spends a lot of time reading his book. He likes to keep it at David’s in case the damp in his house damaged it, so most weekends he sits by the windowsill or in David’s cosy armchair, drinking tea and learning the opinions of one lesser-known Frenchman who he seems to relate to rather a bit.

_“Music and Dancing not only give great pleasure but have the honour of depending on Mathematics, for they consist in number and in measure. Therefore, whatever the old doctors may say, to employ oneself at all this is to be a Philosopher and a Mathematician.”_

Patrick used to be rather adept in business and finance at school as well as the arts, so much so that when he originally decided to move to New York it was going to be for a job as a bookie or with an investment company. But when he got there and started to rediscover just how much he loved to dance – and just how good he was at it, too – he began to realise that there was something in it that calmed him in the same way numbers had. When it came to certain variations, ones that had been written by the greats that no one dared question, there were right and wrong answers. There were ways to perfect and do right, and once he’d learned the dance he could flow through the motions in a familiar, soothing way.

On the other side of the coin, there was an unpredictability to it that came with his career change. There’s times where he messes up in rehearsals, realises he worked better with this kind of team than the one at the docks, times when his heart spills over into his mind and the choreographer has to scold him for overenthusiasm. One time, he accidentally kicked Ronnie the stagehand in the face while practicing the end of his pas de deux with Mutt playing Prince Siegfried, and is still certain he made an enemy in her that day.

But at the end of the day, he feels at home here in this mixture of logic and passion. Of maths and movement. At the end of the day, he can crawl into bed next to David and cuddle up as close as he wants, his sore muscles relaxing in the candlelight and under David’s gentle squeezes.

“I should probably spend the next week at home,” Patrick says regretfully one night in the third week of January. “Rachel will never forgive me if I leave the stove off for so long that the damp in the walls turns to rot.”

David makes a sympathetic little noise, then rubs his hand up and down Patrick’s bicep. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think Rachel’s been spending much time at your house either between slaving away over costumes in her studio and _connecting_ with Twyla in her little townhouse across the road.”

Patrick chuckles and nestles himself further into David’s arms.

“How did your lesson with my mother go today?” he continues.

“Ugh, don’t. She just looked me up and down three times and instructed me to dance like an Indonesian scarf caught in the wind. I don’t think I’ll be going back.”

David hums like he expected it. “The last thing you need before the press get involved is Moira Rose giving you any advice.”

 _Before the press get involved_ was a hefty understatement. They’d been getting involved for some time now, hounding Patrick in the street and following him with cameras when he and Rachel walked through Central Park with their funnel cakes and bratwurst.

They’re there in a bigger troupe the next day as David and Patrick come out the front door of the Opera Rouge, all snapping bulbs and scratching on notepads. Now Patrick understands why Alexis had slipped a periwinkle blue winter coat and a brown Cossack hat into his dressing room with a wink earlier that day, as though she knew her fellow press would be out in force. He’s feeling rather good about himself stood there, prepared and looking his best in the face of the public. David whispers “you look like a Russian” in his ear to make him smile, and Patrick’s glad as he’s not sure he would have been able to fake one for too long.

The next few weeks pass in a similar vein, until there’s only two weeks left until the performance and the cast are getting more and more antsy to perfect it.

David claps his hands to stop for the fifth time in ten minutes.

“Smoother! I want a smoother transition when Klaire replaces Patrick on stage. I know Odette usually plays both roles so this might look odd, but I’ve seen you do it before. Again.”

The orchestra picks up from where they left, before –

“No, stop! Stop – Jake, you need to come in later, and Rothbart needs to be a little less…sensual? He’s a bit more detached than what you’re giving me here.”

Rachel taps David on the shoulder. “I think the problem with Patrick’s movement here is the costume,” she says. “I put too many feathers on the inner seam and it’ll be restricting his movement. Mind if I take him away for a minute?”

David looks Patrick over and nods. “Sure. Just bring him back in ten, we didn’t budget for a break today.”

Rachel meets Patrick in the wings. “You heard the guy, ten minutes. And I need a word with you in that time, too.”

Patrick mock-gasps. “You’re firing me.”

“Wha – no, shut up. I don’t even have the power to do that. Just listen to me.”

Rachel positions Patrick in the middle of his dressing room and pulls out her belt of needles and thread.

“Two things,” she says, measuring the feathers on his white breeches. “First, I think we should break the lease on our flat.”

“Uh…what, now?”

Rachel tuts. “No, not now. The contract is up in a month, and –”

“Ow! Careful with the needle.”

“Sorry. Anyway, the contract is up in a month, and what with everything going on I think we can do much better for ourselves this year.”

They share a smile, looking out at the dressing room together. There’s an electric chandelier, a basin painted with red roses and a red chaise lounge that he’s spent more than one evening relaxing with David on after dance.

“Second thing. Are your parents coming to see the show?”

Patrick falls silent. Rachel is getting to work trimming some of the feathers and sewing them closer to his thighs, oblivious to the fact that everything in the room seems to have gotten a bit louder.

“I…I don’t know.”

She snorts, still unaffected. “Come on. They know about you, right? It’s not like you haven’t corresponded with them at all since we moved.”

“I know, but…they don’t know this is what I do now. It’s one thing for them to think about me working at the docks, getting by in a city where life is a bit easier, but having them actually _see_ me?”

Rachel starts to understand. She pulls away from Patrick when she finishes the work and stands up.

“You know, my parents are coming too,” she says. “Well, I haven’t asked them yet, but I know they’ll say yes. We can send the telegrams at the same time, if you like.”

Patrick twists his mouth, thinking. “I. I don’t…I don’t know, Rachel. It just feels too _near._ And then if they come I’ll introduce them to David, and it just scares me, you know?”

Rachel opens the door for Patrick and they head back down the hallway.

“Want to know what I read the other day?”

“Since when do you read books?”

Rachel shrugs. “Twyla and I like to read to each other sometimes. She bought the new Oscar Wilde piece, and he said ‘I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.’”

Patrick thinks it over. If his parent were to come here, they could connect with him in a way that made him feel in control. He doesn’t have to try too hard to be himself or show off the parts of himself he wants them to see the most, because he’s not being himself at all.

“Okay,” he decides. “I’ll do it. We can send them a note this afternoon.”

Rachel smiles and tugs Patrick in for a one-armed hug. “You won’t regret it, honestly.”

Back in the wings, their section of the rehearsal has ended and Twyla is poised on stage in sync with the other baby swans doing _Danse les Cygnes._ Patrick seats himself down in the stalls where some of the other actors are taking a break, then he catches sight of David at the very back.

He approaches David and finds him with his eyes closed, letting the other crew sort out the rehearsal.

“What’s wrong, sleepy?” he says softly, lowering himself down into the seat beside David and smoothing over the stress lines near his eyes.

David opens his eyes and runs a hand over his face. “Tired.”

Patrick raises an eyebrow. He knows that can’t be all, he’s watched David try and map out choreography in his bedroom at four in the morning. “And?”

David’s silent for a good few minutes. Just when Patrick’s about to ask him again, he says, “Do you ever feel like you’re doing something just because it’s what your parents did?”

“Um…no.”

“Wait, yeah. Sorry.”

“It’s fine, I get what you mean. You feel like you’re only doing this because, what, your father’s doing it?”

“Well…it’s not that I want to be like my parents exactly, but I just…” he sighs, leaning forward in his chair and dropping his chin onto the heel of his hand. “This place just feels like a safety net. It’s not something I made for myself, you know? It’s not something I thought up.”

“Is that what you’d like to do? Think things up?”

David shrugs. “I haven’t really decided yet. I know I want to create, but it’s not the same kind of creating you do.”

Patrick nods, trying to understand by applying it to his own views. “I think I’m a lot more comfortable doing this. Following orders, making something that’s already been made. I’m assuming you’re the opposite?”

“God, yes. I don’t want someone’s crusty old opinions all over my work.”

Patrick laughs softly. After checking that everyone’s distracted, he drops a kiss to David’s cheek and watches the tension seep out of his face.

“We’re both going to be okay,” he whispers. “Two more weeks to go and you’ll be free.”

David looks at him with more softness in his eyes than Patrick has ever seen.

“Two more weeks and you’ll be free, too,” David says.

 _I love you,_ he thinks, and he almost says it.

* * *

“Ah!”

“Patrick?”

“Stevie, what are you –”

“Oh my God, I’m sorry –”

“This –”

“Okay, just start again. Go away, put some clothes on, returning is optional,” Stevie says, her hands clamped over her eyes.

Patrick grips tighter at the towel around his waist and quickly runs back into David’s room.

“What is Stevie doing in your private breakfast parlor at this time of morning?” he demands.

David looks up at him from the bed, groans and then beds himself back down in the white pillows. “Every other Wednesday since we were eighteen,” David mumbles. “No offence, but she has more place in there than you do walking around the top floor of my house naked.”

“It’s _your_ wing of the house!”

“Whatever, put your clothes on,” David says, and turns back over in bed.

Five minutes later, Patrick shuffles back into the parlor. Stevie is sat with her feet up on the table, sipping a coffee and reading the newspaper.

“I’m on strict orders to not let you eat any carbohydrates. No pastries, no bagels, _no_ English breakfast,” she says.

“What’s this?” Patrick says, sitting down opposite her in front of his sad looking plate.

“Egg whites and steamed spinach,” she says smugly. “Anything heavier and you’ll get a side stitch and hurl up on stage.”

Patrick concedes, picking at his meagre breakfast. Despite it being basically nothing, it still sits like lead in his stomach from the nerves.

“How long now?” he asks Stevie.

She looks at the clock on the wall. “We have to be at the theatre for four o’clock, so…eight hours.”

“Forgive me if I spend seven hours and fifteen minutes of that heaving over the toilet,” he mutters. Stevie folds up her newspaper and leans in, her face more sympathetic than before.

“What’s wrong? You weren’t this nervous on review night.”

“Well, the theatre was barely full and they were all journalists,” Patrick says. “This is one thousand members of the public who might have come miles to see me. _Me,”_ he repeats as the reality of it sinks in.

“Yeah, you and the rest of the cast and the orchestra, too. And David,” she counters. “In the nicest way possible, it’s not all about you.”

Patrick nods, picking his way through the rest of his breakfast. Stevie’s right, but in his own world it _is_ all about him, too. It’s about his parents, who he isn’t even sure are coming yet; it’s about David, and his last performance as theatre director to go perfectly; it’s about him, finally living as the person he was always meant to be. He doesn’t want to prod at the wound by bringing it up with Stevie, so he just thanks her for her advice and moves on.

“So what are you going to do once David quits?” he says. “Don’t you oversee the finances for the Opera Rouge?”

“And a million other things for that place, yeah,” she says, taking a long sip of her coffee. “Not that I mind, it’s a good job. And I still get to work close to Johnny, which I enjoyed way more than David ever did.”

“Am I ears burning? Stevie, are you spreading scandalous rumors about me again?”

David comes into the room in his long dressing gown, walking up behind Patrick to massage his shoulders and kiss the top of his head. “Egg whites? Ugh. You could have picked something a bit kinder like melon, Stevie.”

“Melon gives you gas, so no. And Patrick’s enjoying those, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely not, I want pain au chocolat.”

“Next week, honey,” David says.

Patrick groans. This was going to be a long day.

It seems to get longer every time Patrick asks Rachel if she’s had any word from either of their parents.

“Patrick, if I don’t hear from them today, I won’t until Monday,” she says for the hundredth time. “And mine don’t have a telephone, remember?”

“I know. I know, I’m just nervous.”

“Do they need you for any final rehearsals? It might take your mind off it.”

“No, David wanted me to get ready for a photograph. Can you help?”

Rachel smiles at him warmly. “Of course.”

He’s already wearing his breeches, but there’s a silvery feathered shoulderpiece to put on top of his leotard, the crown of twigs and feathers and starry, glimmering jewels, and his sharp blue eye makeup. Rachel helps him into his shoulderpiece and he tests his mobility a few times as she positions his crown and gets to work dusting his entire upper face with the shimmering blue and white powder, painting little stars and swirls under his eyes. When she’s done, he turns to look at himself in the mirror.

“Look at you, Swan King,” Rachel says fondly.

That’s not all Patrick sees. He sees himself, staring back for what feels like the first time in forever. It’s all he can do not to cry his makeup off.

Just then, Alexis bursts through the door without knocking and gasps at the sight, her camera bustling and knocking behind her.

“Oh my _God,_ look at you! What’s happened to our little button?!”

“Close the door, I don’t want David to see until later!”

“You’re not getting _married,_ Patrick,” Alexis scoffs. “Now stand against the plain wall and get in second position. I want you to look perfect for the front cover.”

Though the first seven hours went at a snail’s pace, the last one passes in that sickly flash of pre-performance time, where every word rushes through your head like spun sugar and your muscle memory picks up at the sound of the orchestra tuning up and the audience taking their seats.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Patrick whispers into the back of Rachel’s head. She’s craning her neck out from the wings to watch the orchestra bow for the applauding audience.

“No you’re not, shut up.”

“I am, I’m gonna be sick everywhere.”

“You’re not even on until the start of the second act!”

“That makes it worse!”

“Shh, they’re starting.”

Patrick cranes his neck too. He can just make out the silhouettes of the Rose family in the very front row. As he expected, the first few notes from the oboe have his toes clenching and his fingers tapping against the sides of his costume. The overture is such a special piece of music to Patrick now that he finds himself engrossed in the seamless blend of works from all across the show, and the need to be sick is gone. Then he watches the lively party that opens the story. Mutt dances across the stage as Prince Siegfried at his party, then stops to bow in front of his mother. Patrick’s always admired Mutt’s silent, unquestioning professionalism, obeying the directors’ orders with no more than a grunt and an “okay”. He’s never really watched the other actors this closely, though. Mutt and Amy-Grace, The Queen, interact so seamlessly and naturally that it gives Patrick a little insight into what the audience are seeing. They haven’t sat bored through long rehearsals before. This is as fresh and new to them as the Rob Roy that David gave Patrick on their night out together in December.

He has to be a part of this story. No matter who’s in the audience. No matter who’s watching, he has to let them see him.

And then it’s his time.

He clenches his toes, but not too tightly, and flexes them out in his hard shoes. Holding onto the railing at first, he gets himself on pointe and relaxes his calves. Rachel doesn’t touch him, but he hears her whisper. He can’t hear what she says over the rush in his head, but it doesn’t matter.

He steps onto the stage and just like that, he’s become a different person. Patrick Brewer has died a thousand deaths on this very stage, moulding himself into people and animals and magical things, and tonight is no different. He’s also surprised to note that what with the lights shining on him, he can’t actually see the audience from his position. No one had bothered to tell him that. Perhaps they were leaving it as a pleasant surprise, because it makes the whole thing so much easier.

And so he dances. Or, rather, The Swan King does in his place. He lets himself be lifted and he moves from grand adage to arabesque to fouetté and he ducks down anthropomorphically on the lake when needed, made to shimmer by the light of the moon from the spotlight window above.

There is no interval. Or maybe there is, but Patrick doesn’t notice. All he knows is that he moves and moves and moves until he and Mutt are ascending to the heavens above Swan Lake, their deaths made more tragic by the audience’s knowledge that it cost their lives to let good prevail. For a terrible moment, Patrick thinks there’s only silence when they finish, but then he realises that it was just the audience taking a collective breath before the applause starts.

It’s not as loud as the blare of the ships that would catch him by surprise right in his ear at the docks, but he doesn’t want it to be. It’s loud in a way that thunders right into his heart, not through his head, one that grounds him and uplifts him and makes him feel more alive than he ever has.

When the cast gather on the stage and bow together, the audience stand up. Patrick catches sight of David in the passing light, clapping as hard as he can with tears streaming down his face. Patrick’s breathing loudly, heavily, and some of the cast are shouting with glee because the audience can’t hear them, but he falls silent when he looks across the stalls and sees four timelessly familiar figures. Rachel’s parents, and then his. They have their arms around each other, Marcy Brewer dwarfed by the foot of height difference, and seem to be crying too hard to clap. Patrick locks eyes with his mother and she reaches her arms out to him, mouthing something Patrick can see even from the stage. _My boy. My sweet boy._

In a blur, the curtain falls and the cast rush backstage to get themselves washed and changed. Rachel helps Patrick sponge himself of his sweat quickly, practically shouting in his ear about how proud she is and listing all her favourite parts, and then Alexis is there with his nice blue coat and Stevie is taking photographs but he can’t concentrate on any of them because he’s only got one person on his mind.

He knows stage door is going to be manic, so he hangs back and lets the more famous dancers like Twyla and Jake see to their long-time admirers before he makes an appearance. When he does, he’s glad he came last. The members of the audience who came round to stage door give a huge cheer and round of applause, all clamoring for Patrick to sign their playbills and answer their questions. He does so politely but quickly, thinking of nothing except the gathering of his friends at the corner of the crowd. David is practically hopping up and down on the spot like he’s preparing himself.

Finally Patrick manages to break away from the crowd to reach them and all but falls into David’s outstretched arms. He lets himself go small and cries into David’s coat from exhaustion and pride and love.

David’s crying too, then he takes a deep breath and pulls away. He runs a thumb across Patrick’s wet cheek and shakes his head.

“I love you,” he says. He sounds as though he’s just realised it, yet also as though he’s been waiting to say it for years. “Patrick, I love you.”

“I love you too,” Patrick whispers back, his heart clenching hard with the sheer truth of it.

Out the corner of his eye, he sees his parents pretending not to watch and stifles a laugh. Breaking out of David’s hold, he approaches them and throws his arms around them both.

“Patrick, you were – you – how? How long have you –? When –?”

“Let the boy breathe, Marcy,” Clint chuckles. He looks down at Patrick through his wiry glasses and wide brimmed hat. “You’re a marvel, son. An absolute marvel. I couldn’t be prouder of you if I tried.”

It’s all Patrick’s ever wanted to hear; even though he already knows it’s true, there’s just something about hearing it out loud that brings fresh tears to his eyes. As the stage door crowd disperse, he walks away with his family and friends, and as he answers their questions and talks about the show and the future with everyone he loves, he can’t help but think that he’s never felt such a thrill to hold David’s hand.

* * *

By the end of the show’s run, Patrick’s certain his toes are going to break off. Not even daily baths in David’s gorgeous claw-footed tub filled with bubbles and lavender salts and rosewater oil can soothe the ache of exhaustion that he knows David is feeling just as keenly, only mentally.

“I mean it when I say this is my last one,” David says for the fifth time that day, cross-legged in the chair beside the bath as Patrick soaks after the penultimate performance. He flips his magazine with such force that it almost rips. “I cannot spend another day with administration and sending endless letters and shitheads like Sebastien breathing down my neck.”

“I know,” Patrick murmurs, sinking further into the hot water. “Have you thought about who you’re going to let run the theatre instead?”

“Not a clue,” David says. “I would tell my dad to take it over again, but he’s going to retire soon. I _could_ ask one of the twins over at the Apothecary Theatre to take over, but –”

“What about Stevie?”

David stops short, thinking. “Stevie?”

“She already does a lot of the work as it is,” Patrick reasons, thinking about their conversation the other morning. “And all the things you hate, she enjoys. I think it’d be good for both of you to make the change.”

David’s lips purse as he stares at a spot on the ground, lost in thought, then the little pout turns up into a smile.

“That’s a brilliant idea,” he says. “Yes. I’ll ask her tonight, she and my dad can get everything sorted out as soon as they like.”

Patrick smiles and David jumps out of his chair to kiss it off his face.

“You wanna get in the bath again like yesterday?”

“No, I’ve already done my hair, the steam would be a disaster.”

David stays there anyway, drifting his finger through the bubbles.

“And what about you? What are you going to do once you quit?” Patrick can already tell David has an answer, but he looks like he’s wincing as though Patrick is going to find it silly. “Go on,” Patrick prompts. “You can tell me.”

“I think…I think I want to write stories,” David says. “I already have some from over the past few years. New York is good inspiration for the kind of romantic comedy I like to write.”

Patrick nods. It makes so much sense. “You once mentioned to me you could see those kinds of stories playing out on the streets.”

“It might not be the most fruitful endeavor, but I’ll be doing what I want and that’s what matters,” he says firmly.

Patrick smiles at him. “I’m proud of you.”

“And I’m proud of you,” David says, reaching out to squeeze Patrick’s shoulder.

“Ow, not there, that’s where my shoulderpiece has been sitting all week.”

“Sorry.”

Without David, Patrick would be feeling at a loss by the end of the run. Before he hands over full control to Stevie, David sets up some interviews for Patrick with a whole host of newspapers and magazines that he never expected he’d ever have anything to do with. All of a sudden, there’s people who _know_ him, and he’s never felt freer in his life. And he likes that David quietly retiring his post and slipping out of the public eye makes _him_ feel free, too.

About six months into his new routine, once Patrick has played a painter and a poet and a king and David is in talks with a publisher about his first book, David takes him to the outskirts of town to show him something. The sun is bright through the windows of the cab, and it calms Patrick to get out of the bustle of the city and into something that resembles the countryside.

After about half an hour, they pull up outside a long path bordered by a tiny trickling river.

“Close your eyes,” David says, taking hold of his hand.

“David, what’s this –”

But he closes his eyes anyway as he’s led across grass and stone steps, opening them when David tells him to. A breathtaking country house stands before him, with a veranda and thick flowerbeds and a fountain in the garden. It’s white, done in the Georgian style, and if Patrick squints he can see two studios in each of the front windows.

“One for me, one for you,” David supplies, as though he’s been tracking Patrick’s eyes since he opened them.

“David…”

“I know,” David breathes. “I know.”

Patrick turns and buries his face into David’s neck as he laughs, feeling more than ever that feeling he always gets with David; the freshness and the familiar dancing a pas de deux in his heart. They kiss, and they promise to make each other happier than they’ve ever been before in their haven in the woods.

As Patrick approaches the house with David, the love of his life, not married but ever willing to be, he can’t help but thank himself for sneaking into that theatre. He never thought that dancing, the fleeting, riotous thing that it is, the sculptures created by it visible only for a moment, would ever lay down roots that feel so right.

* * *

_The End_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope you all have a wonderful time over the next few days and your New Year is hopeful & fulfilling.


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